FDA Sodium Reduction Targets and the Food Industry: Are There Incentives to Reformulate? Microsimulation Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.

Unlabelled: Policy Points The World Health Organization has recommended sodium reduction as a "best buy" to prevent cardiovascular disease (CVD). Despite this, Congress has temporarily blocked the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from implementing voluntary industry targets for sodium reduction in processed foods, the implementation of which could cost the industry around $16 billion over 10 years. We modeled the health and economic impact of meeting the two-year and ten-year FDA targets, from the perspective of people working in the food system itself, over 20 years, from 2017 to 2036.

Adoption and Design of Emerging Dietary Policies to Improve Cardiometabolic Health in the US.

Purpose Of Review: Suboptimal diet is a leading cause of cardiometabolic disease and economic burdens. Evidence-based dietary policies within 5 domains-food prices, reformulation, marketing, labeling, and government food assistance programs-appear promising at improving cardiometabolic health. Yet, the extent of new dietary policy adoption in the US and key elements crucial to define in designing such policies are not well established.

Calorie labeling, fast food purchasing and restaurant visits.

Objective: Obesity is a pressing public health problem without proven population-wide solutions. Researchers sought to determine whether a city-mandated policy requiring calorie labeling at fast food restaurants was associated with consumer awareness of labels, calories purchased and fast food restaurant visits.

Design And Methods: Difference-in-differences design, with data collected from consumers outside fast food restaurants and via a random digit dial telephone survey, before (December 2009) and after (June 2010) labeling in Philadelphia (which implemented mandatory labeling) and Baltimore (matched comparison city).

Childhood obesity: a framework for policy approaches and ethical considerations.

Although obesity rates among US children have increased during the past 3 decades, effective public policies have been limited, and the quest for workable solutions raises ethical questions. To address these concerns, in 2010, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation convened an expert panel to consider approaches to the ethics problems related to interventions for childhood obesity. On the basis of recommendations from the expert panel, we propose frameworks for policy approaches and ethical aspects of interventions and evaluation.

Personal responsibility and obesity: a constructive approach to a controversial issue.

The concept of personal responsibility has been central to social, legal, and political approaches to obesity. It evokes language of blame, weakness, and vice and is a leading basis for inadequate government efforts, given the importance of environmental conditions in explaining high rates of obesity. These environmental conditions can override individual physical and psychological regulatory systems that might otherwise stand in the way of weight gain and obesity, hence undermining personal responsibility, narrowing choices, and eroding personal freedoms.

Calorie labeling and food choices: a first look at the effects on low-income people in New York City.

We examined the influence of menu calorie labels on fast food choices in the wake of New York City's labeling mandate. Receipts and survey responses were collected from 1,156 adults at fast-food restaurants in low-income, minority New York communities. These were compared to a sample in Newark, New Jersey, a city that had not introduced menu labeling.

The politics of obesity: a current assessment and look ahead.

Context: The continuing rise in obesity rates across the United States has proved impervious to clinical treatment or public health exhortation, necessitating policy responses. Nearly a decade's worth of political debates may be hardening into an obesity issue regime, comprising established sets of cognitive frames, stakeholders, and policy options.

Methods: This article is a survey of reports on recently published studies.

Obesity, courts, and the new politics of public health.

Health care politics are changing. They increasingly focus not on avowedly public projects (such as building the health care infrastructure) but on regulating private behavior. Examples include tobacco, obesity, abortion, drug abuse, the right to die, and even a patient's relationship with his or her managed care organization.

The politics of obesity: seven steps to government action.

Concern is rapidly growing about obesity rates in the United States. This paper analyzes the political consequences. Despite myths about individualism and self-reliance, the U.