Death and injury from motor vehicle crashes had reached epidemic levels by the 1950s and continues at unacceptably high levels today. The lessons learned in failed and successful attempts to reduce auto crash losses can provide guideposts for obesity control efforts.
This preliminary report captures advice from a meeting that uncovered practical experience from specific policy battles in tobacco, alcohol, firearms, and traffic safety to help public health funders and practitioners identify how to speed up progress on obesity. These lessons are integrated into the final report. The appendix outlines the components of an infrastructure to support policy advocacy to prevent and reduce obesity.
Alcohol policy work has a number of important similarities to nutrition and fitness policy. Looking back at its successes and challenges holds important lessons for advocates wanting to shape policy on childhood obesity.
This memorandum reviews the history of the public health approach to gun violence prevention, with a focus on certain aspects of firearm policy-making in the United States, to determine what lessons from those experiences may relate to policy changes regarding nutrition and obesity.
Childhood overweight and physical inactivity have reached epidemic levels in the United States, and they are taking a terrible toll on health. This memo explores the prevalence of the problem, its causes and implications, and some of the issues that are blocking the development of a strong consumer-based movement aimed at prevention.
Understanding the shift in tobacco control from primarily behavioral approaches toward policy approaches can provide insight into a winning strategy that can be applied to obesity prevention.
This appendix to the preliminary report outlines the components of an infrastructure to support policy advocacy to prevent and reduce obesity: policy advocacy support, bridging, and media advocacy. It also describes 20 research questions for accelerating progress on obesity.
We wrote this handbook to help the national child care community communicate effectively with journalists and others. The guide summarizes public opinion and media research on child care and provides a menu of tested messages for advocates. It is modeled after a similar document created in the 1980s by the Advocacy Institute to assist tobacco-control advocates. The appendix contains a report from Ethel Klein, who conducted the public opinion research BMSG commissioned for the message guide.
This appendix to Making the Case for Early Care and Education: A Message Development Guide for Advocates contains a report from Ethel Klein of EDK Associates in New York, who conducted the public opinion research BMSG commissioned for the message guide.
In this article, published in the American Journal of Health Behavior, BMSG Director Lori Dorfman discusses how analyzing the news can help advocates find ways to garner media coverage for their issue and advance policy. Findings from BMSG’s research on how two public health issues have been portrayed in the news suggest ways that advocates can make themselves — and data — more readily available to reporters. The research also underscores how journalists can improve their reporting by expanding their list of sources, including more context in their work, and asking better questions based on epidemiology.
