This post was written by PolicyLink Senior Associate Sarah Treuhaft.

Childhood obesity is a key dilemma of our generation. Since the early 1970s, obesity rates have doubled for 2 to 5 year olds, tripled for adolescents ages 12 to 19, and quadrupled for 6 to 11 year olds. Not surprisingly, rates are highest for low-income and nonwhite kids who are more likely to live in neighborhoods that seem to conspire against healthy choices.

What can be done? A theme issue of the journal Health Affairs released this morning asks this question, exploring trends, presenting lessons learned from state and local actions, and addressing the roles of neighborhoods, food policy, and schools in reversing the epidemic.

The new journal includes an article we wrote with colleagues at The Food Trust that describes the nuts and bolts of how one policy win can lead to many. In Pennsylvania, advocates successfully established a fund in 2004 that has since helped 83 grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and neighborhood stores open in underserved neighborhoods or expand their existing stores (all while creating or saving 5,000 jobs!).

Over the past several years, Illinois and New York state, as well as the city of New Orleans, launched similar programs based on the Pennsylvania model. The Obama Administration has proposed a $400 million investment in a national Healthy Food Financing Initiative. (We are working to make this happen, click here to find out more and sign on to our letter of support).

The article discusses how advocates moved the campaigns forward at the state and national level, presenting it as a five-step framework from understanding the problem through data and mapping analysis to policy implementation and evaluation. Hopefully, it can help policymakers, child advocates, health coalitions, and others advance their own childhood obesity campaigns.

(Video courtesy of the very cool Market Makeovers program in LA. Check them out)

Today’s equity news,  

 “Making a Healthy Lunch, and Making It a Cause,” -  The New York Times

Between them, Kristin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey have worked on Wall Street, traveled the world and taught school from East Africa to Ecuador. Now they make lunch for a living.

Friends since they met in business school at the University of California, Berkeley, Ms. Richmond and Ms. Tobey founded Revolution Foods Inc. to ride a political and economic wave: surging support for healthier food in school cafeterias.

“ACORN’s Real Crime: Empowering the Poor,” - alternet.org

The name Felix Walker is not one you would recognize, but this 19th-century congressman inadvertently contributed a word to America’s political lexicon that you will recognize–a word that fairly well sums up a lot of what we’re getting these days from right-wing politicos and pundits.

In the 1820s, Walker was the U.S. representative for Buncombe County, North Carolina. In an age of great political orators, Walker was not one. He was a droner, a dull fellow known for expressing his dullness at great length on every topic. No matter what issue was up for debate in the House–no matter whether he had any real knowledge, facts, or insights to add–Walker would rise to speak, insisting that his constituents back home would want his voice heard. He would then launch into a wandering, wearisome, often-nonsensical discourse that he always called “a speech for Buncombe.”

“New push for infrastructure funding in US jobs bill,” -  Reuters

WASHINGTON, Jan 21 (Reuters) - The Obama administration, key lawmakers and big trade groups want to include billions of dollars for transportation and infrastructure in pending legislation aimed at easing stubbornly high U.S. unemployment.

The move reflects cold calculations about what initiatives will take priority amid joblessness that is near a 26-year high at 10 percent and rapidly shifting political sands in Washington ahead of next November’s congressional elections.

A couple years ago, a celebrity chef out of London convinced the city’s school district to allow him to remake the lunch menu (and kitchens) of a group of city schools. He argued the change could make the kids both healthier and more successful at school.

The results so far are incredibly encouraging:

Their answer – a provisional one, since they are still refining the research – is that feeding primary school kids less fat, sugar and salt, and more fruit and vegetables, has a surprisingly large effect. Authorised absences, the best available proxy for illness, fell by 15 per cent in Greenwich, relative to schools in similar London boroughs. And relative to other boroughs, the proportion of children reaching Level Four in English rose by four and a half percentage points (more than six per cent), while the proportion of children achieving Level Five in Science rose by six points, or almost 20 per cent.

(via the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein)

This post is written by Dr. Joe Thompson, the director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity and the Surgeon General of Arkansas. 

Cereal and Saturday morning cartoons go together like peanut butter and jelly. The downside is what else our children are seeing when they turn on the television.

The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University on Monday released Cereal F.A.C.T.S. (Food Advertising to Children and Teens Score) earlier this week which reported on, and rated, how cereals are marketed, and specifically targeted, towards children.

According to the report’s executive summary, “The least healthy cereals are the ones most marketed to children, and overall, children are exposed to a vast amount of marketing for highly-sugared cereals, more than for any other category of packaged food.”

Their results found that seven of the 10 cereals with the poorest nutritional content are the same products most heavily advertised on television and the internet. One of the study’s key findings is that cereals marketed to children have 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fiber, and 60 percent more sodium. And although none of these cereals qualifies to be included in the USDA Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, they all are designated as “smart choices” by the Council of Better Business Bureaus. These foods may proclaim to be “better-for-you,” but in actuality they are contributing to children’s poor health and the obesity epidemic.

With marketing targeting our young people, it creates a near toxic media environment that overwhelms kids with advertising on children’s networks and websites like Nickelodeon, Disney, and the Cartoon Network–networks that now bring the advertising into our homes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week..

However alarming the statistics in the study may be, they are also indications that environmental factors can be changed via policy change and governmental regulation.

In the long run, this kind of regulation is helpful for all of our children, especially those who are disproportionately impacted by overweight and obesity: children of color and children in low-income communities.

To read the full study visit Cereal Facts.org.

A recap of the week’s equity news

“Dear Parent: Your Child Is Fat,” - Time Magazine

School children across England will soon have their Body Mass Index (BMI) tested as part of a new effort to tackle the growing problem of childhood obesity. Parents will be sent a letter telling them whether their child is underweight, a healthy weight, overweight or very overweight. The letter will also include leaflets giving advice on eating healthily, physical activities their child might do and the risks of being overweight.

So, are parents really failing to notice their little angels piling on the pounds? Yes, says the U.K.’s Department of Health. “Today, when more children are overweight compared with previous generations, it can be harder for parents to objectively identify if their child is overweight,” says a spokeswoman from the Department of Health. “Research shows that most parents of overweight or obese children think that their child is a healthy weight. Some research showed that only 10% of parents with overweight or obese children described their child as overweight.”

“Black population deserting S.F., study says,” - San Francisco Chronicle

African Americans are leaving San Francisco because of substandard schools, a lack of affordable housing and the dearth of jobs and black culture, according to a report by a committee looking into the exodus.

The African American Out-migration Task Force, put together by the mayor’s office last year to figure out what can be done to preserve the city’s remaining black population and cultivate new residents, presented its findings at a public hearing Thursday called by Supervisor Chris Daly.

“America’s Fasting-Dying Cities,” - Forbes Magazine

Washington, D.C. - The turmoil of the mortgage market granted a temporary reprieve from hearing about the woes of America’s Rust Belt. That doesn’t mean things are better. Despite a decade of national prosperity, the former manufacturing backbone of the U.S. is in rougher shape than ever, still searching for some way to replace its long-stilled smokestacks.

Where’s it worst? Ohio, according to our analysis, which racked up four of the 10 cities on our list: Youngstown, Canton, Dayton and Cleveland. The runner-up is Michigan, with two cities–Detroit and Flint–making the ranking.