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)

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.

“Yes, there’s a difference in the stores in our area compared to the stores in (higher-income) Montclair or somewhere else. You know, the vegetables are great up there, everything is so beautiful. And you come down here, and I think we get ours last off the truck.”

That is how one Oakland resident describes the state of healthy food access in their community — one of more than 180 voices that helped create Healthy Food For All: Building Equitable and Sustainable Food Systems in Detroit and Oakland, a new report by PolicyLink, the C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems at Michigan State University, and the Fair Food Network.

The report shows clearly that our food system – from farm to table to landfill – is broken, unhealthy, unsustainable, and unjust.

One of the worst symptoms of this broken system is the grocery gap in low-income communities of color: Twenty-six million urban residents live in low-income neighborhoods where there is no supermarket within walking distance.

The report not only highlights residents’ struggles, it also lifts up the successes we’ve seen driven by residents, advocates, and community groups. Promising strategies showcased in the report include:

* Developing or attracting new neighborhood grocery stores
* Expanding local food production through urban farms and community gardens
* Enabling the use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits at farmers’ markets
* Establishing food policy councils
* Linking low-income residents to jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities in food businesses

The movement for equitable access to healthy food is gaining strength every day. Read the report for more ideas on how to ensure better access for all communities.

I attended an event yesterday that was more than 30 years in the making. 

As I looked around the White House Office of Urban Affairs listening tour meeting at a packed Philadelphia warehouse space and saw low-income residents and local leaders mingling with some of our nation’s most powerful people (including two cabinet secretaries!), I thought back on where the fight for equitable access to healthy food started for me. 

It was 1979 and I was recently out of UC-Berkeley Law School and working for the public-interest law firm Public Advocates when a group of residents of a low-income, African-American neighborhood in San Francisco approached me to see if I could help stop their community’s one and only supermarket from leaving. In my hometown of St. Louis, I had seen first-hand the neglect and despair that festered after supermarkets left poor communities there.

No one had ever tried before to find a legal theory that would provide communities access to healthy food, so we were on uncharted legal ground.  Using interviews with more than 150 residents of local communities threatened by a lack of food access, we eventually filed an administrative petition with then-Gov. Jerry Brown seeking redress to the problem of the exodus of supermarkets from low-income communities.  The Governor was remarkably responsive: appointing a commission that held hearings throughout the state.  

Because of the determination of those residents, California began a slow move toward improving healthy food access for millions of our neighbors; the petition sparked farmers’ markets, cooperative buying clubs, a few cooperative markets-but, unfortunately, not one supermarket.

In the years since, equitable food access has been mostly relegated to a local issue, with fights cropping up sporadically in neighborhoods as local supermarkets threaten to leave. We had seen some successes - like San Diego’s Market Creek Plaza or the Pathmark in Harlem - but the victories had been hard to come by.

That is, until about five years ago, when Pennsylvania’s Gov. Ed Rendell and State Rep. Dwight Evans began to listen to the ideas and innovation of their constituents and the leadership of The Food Trust and The Reinvestment Fund. Out of that collaboration came the Fresh Food Financing Initiative, a remarkable program that has helped open dozens of markets and seed more than 3,700 jobs in under-served communities.

Now, through the tireless efforts of residents and advocates, the White House Office of Urban Affairs has shown real interest in learning about this proven program, hopefully to take the ideas and solutions to the national scale. White House leaders want to lift up the program and hear how it is impacting real people. For the first time, I can see the fight for equitable food access is winnable.

I cannot stress enough how important and exciting it is to have a White House willing to listen to new and innovative ideas. This administration - in virtually every office and agency - seems to recognize that all Americans deserve to live in a community of opportunity.

But that does not mean progress will happen on its own. Far from it. The most important attribute the equity movement has going for it is our tenacity. Thirty years ago, when those residents came into my office to ask for help in improving their community, I knew it would be a long, hard fight. But sitting in Philadelphia this week, I felt emboldened to keep fighting, to keep pushing, because success is always within our grasp.

We must demand equity now.

Like many people working in the trenches to combat the scourge of “food deserts” in America, I was excited to hear the USDA was releasing a new study about the problem. With the overwhelming scientific evidence showing a lack of access to healthy food is a detriment to our health, the spotlight from the USDA was quite welcome.

While the USDA should be commended for looking at the food desert issue, it seemed to miss the boat on the depth, breadth, and consequences of the problem.

By the report’s own admission, 23.5 million Americans live in low-income communities without a grocery store within walking distance. That’s about one in every 13 people. That doesn’t seem to jibe with the study’s first finding that “access to a supermarket or large grocery store is a problem for a small percentage of households.”

But more odd is the study’s relative dismissal of the benefits of healthy eating and the real fallout from living in a community with little or no access to fresh food. There has been significant scientific research showing the vital role fresh food consumption and access play in our health:

• A 2002 study in the American Journal of Public Health found fruit and vegetable consumption among African Americans rose 32 percent with each additional local food store.
• A 2006 study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found lowest rates of obesity (21 percent) among people living in neighborhoods with supermarkets or grocery stores and the highest rates of obesity (32-40 percent) among people living in places with no supermarkets and access to only smaller grocery stores and convenience stores.
• A 2007 national study of more than 70,000 teens found that increased availability of chain supermarkets was associated with lower rates of being overweight
• A March 2009 study in Indianapolis showed adding a new grocery store to a neighborhood translated into a 3 pound weight decrease for residents.

This a public health issue, plain and simple. As we demonstrated in the 2008 report, Designed for Disease: The Link Between Local Food Environments and Obesity and Diabetes, people living in neighborhoods crowded with fast-food and convenience stores but relatively few grocery or produce outlets have a significantly higher prevalence of obesity and diabetes.

In Ezra Klein’s blog post for the Washington Post today, he says that food deserts aren’t the problem. “The problem, it seems, is the opposite: food swamps. Areas dense with fast food and convenience stores,” he writes.

But this is not an either-or proposition. Designed for Disease showed clearly that a dramatically unbalanced food environment is a direct health risk. Having no food choices at all is just as problematic as having a glut of bad food choices.

Photo used under a Creative Common License from Flickr user Spine (aka Rick)

The economic crisis has brought hunger and food access back into the national conversation. Food pantry shelves are picked bare. Milk and bread prices keep climbing. And millions of families across America are resorting to low-cost, low-nutrition food to make ends meet.

Thankfully, though, this renewed attention has also brought smart, pragmatic, and compassionate food policies and programs:

• • PolicyLink President Judith Bell presented ideas to increase healthy food access at a recent Center for American Progress policy panel. Click here for the full video and here to view Judith’s PowerPoint.
  • The federal stimulus package looks set to include a significant 13 percent boost in food stamps and more than $350 million for local shelters and food banks, emergency food assistance, and Meals on Wheels.
  • New York Governor David Paterson proposed a new supermarket development fund, modeled after a highly successful program in Pennsylvania.
  • The federal food desert study that PolicyLink and other advocates helped to get in last year’s Farm Bill is well underway. The study will look at the “challenges many Americans face in accessing healthy and affordably priced foods needed for a healthy diet.”
  • New Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack gave a promising interview to the Washington Post talking about the importance of healthy food in schools.

The health of millions of Americans will be tested throughout this economic crisis. It is all the more reason to fight for fair, just, and equitable food access for everyone.

Additional resources, conference info and news after the jump…

(more…)

With food prices climbing and the economy on shaky legs, more and more Americans are taking the food security of their families and their communities into their own hands.

An insightful piece in today’s NY Times (”Urban Farmers’ Crops Go from Vacant Lot to Market“) shows how innovative residents of low-income communities are using training from local nonprofits and even some funding from city coffers to help kick-start urban farms.

I know that these urban farms have really helped invigorate my neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. In fact, a 60-person delegation from the UN Commission on Sustainable Development is coming this weekend to Bed-Stuy to visit a couple community gardens, like the Bed-Stuy Farm (photo from their site).

Also, it’s worth pointing out that the Times’ story was written by Tracie McMillan, one of the best and most tenacious reporters when it comes to issues of food access and low-income communities. Visit her site to check out some of her recent work.