Pouring rights contracts and childhood overweight: a critical theory perspective.

Purpose: To examine school environments, and in particular, pouring rights contracts and how they relate to childhood overweight from a critical theory perspective.

Conclusions: Pouring rights contracts provide a profit to powerful mega-corporations at the expense of children's health. There is a need to move beyond a solely individual approach to addressing childhood overweight and involve a social ecology approach. This would involve a push for social change, including removal of soda machines from schools, and changing marketing practices targeted at children.

Practice Implications: Nurses are poised in community situations to actively effect social changes to improve health outcomes of our nation's most vulnerable people, but nurses must get involved.