Healthy Eating Active Communities
The California Endowment created the HEAC Initiative to foster healthy eating and activity environments for California’s children. HEAC sites in Baldwin Park, Chula Vista, Los Angeles, Oakland, Santa Ana, and Shasta counties focus their efforts on six sectors: schools, after-school, neighborhoods, health care settings, and marketing and advertising. BMSG worked with the sites to address the marketing and advertising sector, and to provide media advocacy training and strategic consultation as the sites pursued policy change in each of the sectors.
Addressing food and beverage marketing that targets kids
Communities confronting obesity are frustrated by the corporate marketing practices that make unhealthy foods and beverages attractive, easily available and readily affordable in our communities. Because pervasive mass media advertising campaigns are created by multinational corporations and regulated by the federal government, many local advocates feel powerless to do anything about this issue. However, what many people don’t realize is that food and beverage corporations’ marketing practices go far beyond TV advertising — and there are many things local communities can do to limit the reach of corporate marketing. BMSG guided grantees in the HEAC Initiative in how to confront these marketing practices through local policy change so they can transform the marketing environment that contributes to persistent and savage disparities in health. To do this, BMSG developed a toolkit for HEAC sites on fighting junk food marketing to kids at the local level. Our toolkit answers the questions:
- How are food and beverage companies marketing their unhealthy products to young people?
- What are their target marketing strategies?
- How can neighbors, parents, teachers, and young people themselves confront marketing that interferes with creating healthy eating environments in their neighborhoods?
The BMSG toolkit, Fighting Junk Food Marketing to Kids, provides examples and stories of what local communities can do about unhealthy marketing practices so people can take action to reduce unwanted marketing and promotion. The toolkit contains everything you need to begin a discussion and take action in your community. Paquete de herramientas Luchemos Contra la Promocin de Alimentos Chatarra entre los niños esta disponible en Español. Watch video in English or en Español that vividly illustrates the problem and what local groups can do about it.
Media advocacy training
BMSG’s first set of trainings for HEAC sites focus on using the food and beverage marketing toolkit. The goal of the training was to help HEAC groups make concrete decisions about where to focus their efforts in the marketing sector, and begin to plan for how to mobilize the community on this issue. In the later years of the HEAC Initiative, BMSG’s trainings focused on how to use media advocacy to advance specific policy goals the sites have identified for each sector.
Strategic consultation
BMSG provided strategic consultation on media advocacy to HEAC sites, and, through the Strategic Alliance’s Rapid Response Media Network to other advocates in California working to improve food and activity environments.
Framing briefs
BMSG provided general support for framing food and activity issues from a public health perspective to HEAC sites, and through the Strategic Alliance’s Rapid Response Media Network to other advocates in California working to improve food and activity environments.
Making the case for breastfeeding: The health argument isn’t enough
Breastfeeding can improve women’s and babies’ health, but simply trumpeting that message won’t improve breastfeeding rates. That’s because many social and cultural barriers make it difficult or undesirable for women to breastfeed. This framing brief shows advocates the key ingredients they need to produce effective breastfeeding messages that promote policies in support of this very basic but vital act.
Sugar water gets a facelift: What marketing does for soda
This Framing Brief describes the intensive, immersive, incessant marketing tactics soda companies are using to encourage young people to drink more of the top non-alcoholic beverage in America, soda.
What surrounds us shapes us: Making the case for environmental change
This Framing Brief helps advocates explain that what surrounds us — our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces — influences our health. When people understand that, then the policies that improve places make sense.
Food marketers greenwash junk food: Companies tout link to health and environmental movements
This Framing Brief explains how food and beverage companies are borrowing the symbolism of the environmental movement to cast a favorable “green” light on themselves and their products. But many of the products they label green are still high in fat, salt and calories, and whether they are eco-friendly is open to debate.
Reading between the lines: Understanding food industry responses to concerns about nutrition
When a food or beverage company does something that might be good for health, should public health groups congratulate them publicly? If not, why not? What do these promises mean? When companies’ words don’t match their deeds the answers are not always clear. This Framing Brief describes how food and beverage companies are reacting to pressure from public health groups and explores the implications for framing public health’s responses to those actions.
The problem with obesity
Obesity has become the popular term for a set of problems that result in premature death and injury from diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. It is a convenient term, but we should stop using it. This framing brief explains why.
Video
Fighting junk food marketing to kids
Food and beverage corporations’ marketing practices go far beyond TV advertising. This video illustrates the extent of the problem and what local groups can do about it. Contact us for a DVD version. Also available in Spanish.
Case study
Attention, Walmart shoppers: Healthy snacks in aisles 7 and 21
Middle-schoolers in the Northern California town of Anderson were fed up with the amount of junk food in the check-out stands of their local grocery stores, mini-mart and gas stations. In this case study, we show how the youth, with guidance from the Healthy Eating Active Communities (HEAC) initiative, became savvy about the effects of such junk on their health and took action to make healthy foods and beverages more visible in their community. Learn more about Shasta’s efforts and other community interventions to improve children’s environments in this Roadmap to improving food and physical activity environments and this evaluation of the HEAC program.