What we drink is directly related to what beverages are — or are not — sold in our communities. Water is the healthiest beverage, but many places, including schools, either don’t offer it or don’t have a safe supply, leaving people to reach for sodas or other sugary beverages instead. We can change this. Part Five of BMSG’s “Talking About” series explains how.
How well we eat depends in large part on whether healthy food is affordable and readily available in our communities. That’s the message of this brief, the fourth part of BMSG’s “Talking About” series, which shows advocates how their messages can help improve the conditions that shape our health.
Joint use, the sharing of school and community resources like parks, playgrounds and gyms, can increase opportunities for adults and children to be active. Find out how it works and what makes joint use successful in Part Three of BMSG’s “Talking About” series.
Walkable communities are those that have enough park space, safe streets and well maintained, well lit walking paths for people to be active at any time of day. Part Two in BMSG’s six-part “Talking About” series, this overview of walkable communities shows why they matter and what advocates can do to help make them a reality in their own communities.
The way a community is designed affects how healthy its residents can become by making it easier or harder to eat well and be active. This resource, Part One in a six-part series, shows advocates how the language they use can help make positive changes to the places they live, work, eat and play.
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.
This site explores a public health strategy called joint use, which increases opportunities for children and adults to be physically active by allowing schools and communities to share resources like parks, swimming pools and playgrounds. Visit jointuse.org to watch videos of joint use success stories, view PhotoVoice photo essays by youth documenting barriers to physical activity, download fact sheets, research summaries and policy analyses, and find out how to jumpstart a joint use partnership in your own community.
Public health advocates have for years been trying to increase the number of women who breastfeed by educating mothers about its health benefits. Breast milk improves babies’ immune systems and decreases women’s risk of everything from osteoporosis to type-2 diabetes. Reporters have trumpeted advocates’ message, yet breastfeeding rates remain dismally low. In this Issue, we explore what’s missing from the conversation and show how advocates in California are shifting the conversation to include the factors outside of health that make it hard for even the most well-informed women to breastfeed.
New technologies are fundamentally altering the alcohol marketing landscape. Even as the “information superhighway” has given way to a web devoted largely to commerce, marketing is one of the least understood aspects of the new media culture. This report summarizes findings from a study we conducted with our colleagues at the Center for Digital Democracy to identify and analyze the emerging alcohol digital marketing practices and to assess the policy implications for both.
These comments were submitted on behalf of the California Convergence to the White House Interagency Task Force on Obesity to inform it’s recommendations for the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign to eliminate childhood obesity in a generation. The comments emphasize the policies across the four pillars of the Let’s Move campaign that will create healthy food and activity environments, focusing on a multi-sector, community-based approach to inform progress.
