Nutrition

This program has been successfully used across the United States to engage youth and adults in community development and change. The process begins with youth trained to collect data that help to provide a comprehensive look at existing community resources. The resulting CYM database highlights resource availability and gaps in a community and serves as a basis for organizing community change. Community Youth Mapping is a youth development strategy instituted by the AED Center for Youth Development and Policy Research. It is ideally coordinated by a local public/private/nonprofit partnership and led by a local community-based institution.

This document summarizes strategies most likely to be effective in promoting healthy eating among school-age youths and provides nutrition education guidelines for a comprehensive school health program. Guidelines are based on a review of research, theory, and current practice, and they were developed by the CDC in collaboration with experts from universities and from national, federal, and voluntary agencies.

This tells the stories of 32 schools and school districts from across the United States that are making changes that make healthy choices the easy choice for students. The stories include K-12 schools, reflecting broad diversity in geographical location and demographics, and document innovative approaches to improve the nutritional quality of foods and beverages sold outside of federal meal programs. Making It Happen is a joint project of Team Nutrition of the Food and Nutrition Service, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Division of Adolescent and School Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and is supported by the United States Department of Education (ED).

This paper identifies and describes school-based interventions to promote consumption of fruit and vegetables among students in school settings that primarily consisted of multi-component interventions that sometimes included an environmental intervention component. Results of these interventions have been positive, especially in their effects on fruit intake. The results of shorter term environmental interventions that used lower prices or increased availability as strategies to increase fruit and vegetable intake have been positive. Several new approaches currently being piloted in schools include school gardening programs, salad bars using fresh produce from local farmers' markets, and in-school, free fruit and vegetable distribution programs. The authors discuss the economics of competitive foods and the role that financial profitability plays in decisions about food availability and sales in the school setting.

The authors argue that interventions targeted at youth are relatively easy to justify on economic grounds due to the additional protections this group requires, but that justification for government interventions aimed at curbing obesity among adults requires additional evidence that private markets are not functioning properly. The authors then present seven proposed intervention strategies to promote healthy eating and use an economic framework to discuss the relative merits of the interventions. This evaluation allows policymakers to make more informed decisions concerning the relative merits of these strategies in combating the obesity epidemic.

The purpose of the Nutrition and Physical Activity Policy Resource Guide is to create a comprehensive resource for the prioritization and development of nutrition and physical activity policies at state, local, and private jurisdictions. Where applicable, evidence of policy effectiveness is provided. Institutional and public policy changes are critical to achieving sustained behavioral change. Policy and environmental changes that support healthy communities, healthy organizations, and healthy choices are cornerstones in the public health world. The resource guide divides the nutrition and physical activity sections into domains of communities, schools, worksites, and healthcare.

This document is in response to the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004. The Act established a new requirement that all school districts with a federally-funded school meals program develop and implement wellness policies that address nutrition and physical activity by the start of the 2006-2007 school years. NANA's document includes model nutrition and physical activity policies which meet the new federal requirement.

This resource listing compiles current polices that aim to improve access to nutrition and physical activity in the community domain, schools, and workplaces.

In this monograph, the Prevention Institute profiles eleven projects in predominantly low-income communities where local residents mobilized public and private resources to make changes in their physical environments to improve the health and quality of life for their citizens.

Published by the Center for Health Improvement's Health Policy Coach as part of a collection of prevention-focused policies, these profiles offer policy recommendations and model practices related to improving nutrition and health.