Establishing healthy beverage patterns during early childhood (ages 0 to 5 years) is important for promoting healthy growth and development in childhood and reducing risk of chronic diseases as an adult. Health care providers play an essential role in identifying and addressing unhealthy beverage consumption patterns in young children and helping families develop healthy beverage More

Nutritious donations are more important than ever: 60 million people turned to the charitable food system in 2020. Food banks rely on retail and distributor donations for about 30 percent of inventory, and often receive unwanted unhealthy food, like soda and candy. This resource was developed to help food retailers and distributors donate more nutritious More

SWAP was developed in 2016 and revised in 2020 to align with the Healthy Eating Research Nutrition Guidelines for the Charitable Food System. Revised tools include: SWAP Toolkit SWAP and Alignment with the HER Nutrition Guidelines SWAP: Overview of a Stoplight Nutrition System for Food Banks and Food Pantries Steps for Getting Started Using SWAP More

More than half of school-age children are under-hydrated, and too many routinely drink sugary beverages, making it harder for their minds and bodies to work well. Drinking water in place of sugary drinks is an important public health strategy to help all children grow up at a healthy weight and to promote good oral health. By More

The Environment and Policy Assessment and Observation (EPAO) is a tool designed to evaluate practices, environmental attributes, and policies of early care and education settings that influence children’s nutrition, physical activity, and sedentary environments. The tool has been updated to assess all current best practices in Go NAP SACC. The EPAO has been expanded to More

Child care providers are a vital part of healthy, thriving communities. Over half of children between the ages of zero and five spend significant time in non-parental child care. These early years are critical for healthy brain development and establishing the habits that last a lifetime. Laws and policies shape how we think of “quality” More

This interactive 50-state map, developed by the Public Health Law Center, syntheses data on how state child care licensing regulations match best practices for 3- to 5-year-olds, relating to healthy eating, active play and screen time best practices. Additional maps relating to best practices for the birth to 2-year-olds plan to be added. This tool More

The Food Market Measures Toolkit compiles, categorizes, and describes healthy food retail measures to assist researchers and public health practitioners in selecting the appropriate measurement tool for their work. While a majority of measures focus on store environment and availability of healthy food, this guide also includes measures of consumer and store-owner perspectives. In addition, More

The California City Soda Tax Calculator is an online tool that generates estimates of how much revenue a sugar-sweetened beverage tax would raise for incorporated California cities with populations over 25,000 (based on 2010 Census data). The calculator allows for a range of sugar-sweetened beverage taxes from ½ cent to 2 cents per ounce. The researchers More

This website provides a compilation of articles that include community-level measures of the food environment, as well as some of the instruments themselves. The food environment is defined to include food stores, restaurants, schools and worksites. This website is updated on a weekly basis.