Public Health Law and Childhood Obesity

On Friday afternoon, I had an interview with Manel Kappagoda of Public Health Law and Policy, which is part of the Public Health Institute in Oakland. She is currently the Deputy Director of the National Policy and Legal Analysis Network to Prevent Childhood Obesity (NPLAN). The Network is working on developing model ordinances to tackle the specter of childhood obesity in America with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Childhood obesity is one of RWJF’s program areas, and the Foundation is committed to reversing the epidemic by the year 2015.

The ordinances that NPLAN is developing are essentially legal tools designed to create social norm changes that will lead to a healthier population. One of these was recently released for communities interested in requiring restaurants to include nutrition information on their menus. It is based on a law that was passed by the Californian Senate but later vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. NPLAN will continue working to develop similar regulations that will help communities keep their children healthy at least through 2010, when their current funding will end. Ms. Kappagoda was incredibly enthusiastic about the work she is doing, but spoke of some of the challenges in preventing childhood obesity; she talked about laws that exist in Quebec that prevent the advertising of children’s products directly to children and the fact that the 1st Amendment would prevent similar laws from being adopted in the US, even though these have had a strong positive effect on the health of children in Quebec.
Ms. Kappagoda stressed that she and her colleagues are not advocates, but that they are just developing products based on the best research available and distributing these to advocate groups and interested governments across the country. If you want more information on this program, or anything else that PHLP is doing, their website is here: http://www.phlaw.org/. They also have a very interesting program on public health and urban planning called "Planning for Healthy Places." This is definitely an organization to keep in mind if you are interested in public health policy and public health law!