State Law Approaches to Addressing Digital Food Marketing to Youth

State consumer protection laws have yet to fully catch up with advances in digital marketing. This report focuses on how existing state consumer protection law can be used to limit harmful digital marketing to children and adolescents. The report describes the key differences between digital and traditional food marketing and discusses a variety of digital More

Economic and Community Development Outcomes of Healthy Food Retail

New grocery stores, corner stores, farmers’ markets, and other food retailers can generate a significant economic stimulus for communities–especially communities of color and lower-income communities. This paper examines the connection between improved healthy food retail and resulting economic and community development. Several types of innovations in food retail, distribution, and production are examined, and select More

Planning for Food Access and Community-Based Food Systems: A National Scan and Evaluation of Local Comprehensive and Sustainability Plans

This report evaluates current local comprehensive and sustainability plans across the United States and their impact on local policies, regulations, and standards to reduce food access disparities and improve community-based foods systems. Of 888 local government responses to a national web-based survey, only 11.8 percent of respondents (105 jurisdictions) indicated that their local plans address More

Providing Water With Meals is Not a Concern for Young Children: Summary of the Literature & Best Practice Recommendations

Promoting water intake has been proposed in order to displace the intake of sugar-sweetened beverages, and new federal and California laws now require water availability in child-care settings. However, some child-care staff have voiced concerns that if young children are provided water with meals, they will fill up on the water and not consume enough More

The New Age of Food Marketing: How Companies are Targeting and Luring Our Kids – and What Advocates Can Do About It

This report provides a snapshot of five categories of marketing tactics used by fast food, snack food, and soft drink companies to target children and adolescents. These categories include: 1) creating immersive environments; 2) infiltrating social networks; 3) location-based and mobile marketing; 4) collecting personal data; and 5) studying and triggering the subconscious. Descriptions of More

Do Farm Subsidies Cause Obesity? Dispelling Common Myths About Public Health and the Farm Bill

It is often argued that farm subsidies have led to the overproduction of commodity crops, and removing these subsidies would help combat obesity by discouraging overproduction of crops that are the base ingredients of unhealthy foods. This white paper analyzes the public health and agricultural economic literature and primary and secondary agriculture policy documents to More

Major Findings from 50-State Survey of State Consumer Protection Law to Limit Junk Food Marketing to Children

This report summarizes findings from a 50-state survey of state consumer protection laws to identify key statutes that hold promise to protect children when they are the targets of marketing for unhealthy food and beverage marketing. The authors apply a consumer protection legal framework by dividing children’s food and beverage marketing into three categories: a) More

Peeking Behind the Curtain: Food and Marketing Industry Research Supporting Digital Media Marketing to Children and Adolescents

This report describes and provides examples of the types of digital marketing research utilized by the food and beverage industry and the potential effects it has on the health of children and adolescents. Researchers found that food and beverage industry, together with the companies they contract, are conducting three major types of research: 1) testing More

Food Marketing in the Digital Age: A Conceptual Framework and Agenda for Research

This report provides a brief summary of how digital marketing works and the role it plays in promoting unhealthy food and beverages to children. Detailed in the report are key concepts of digital marketing; implications for young people’s health; challenges digital marketing concepts raise for researchers; and relevant theoretical models for understanding how the new More