Voices for Healthy Kids: Marketing Matters. Policy Approaches to Protect Children from Unhealthy Food Marketing at School

While school nutrition has continued to take large and critical steps forward, schools continue to be a vulnerable environment where children are subjected to marketing in a myriad of ways.  This session will look at public policy approaches as well as the latest research on how this marketing is understood by parents. 

We will discuss key aspects of policy approaches, and policy lessons learned from specific state experiences under the first year of the Voices for Healthy Kids initiative. We will also explore legal implications of policy approaches as well as share results of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded research on perceptions of marking to children. 

The Voices for Healthy Kids initiative, a national partnership between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the American Heart Association, was developed to strengthen and support state and local advocates by advancing evidence-based childhood obesity policy in order to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015.  Among its six policy priority areas, Voices for Healthy Kids aims to protect children from unhealthy food and beverage marketing through its Marketing Matters team of experts.