← Back to Resources

Harvard Public Health Magazine Highlights CHOICES

Collage of produce and snack foods

Kent Dayton/Harvard Chan

Harvard Public Health magazine highlights the CHOICES project and our cost-effectiveness analysis model in a feature article about the obesity epidemic. Team lead, Dr. Steve Gortmaker, and new team member, Sara Bleich, had the opportunity to discuss the nature of the epidemic, the cost-effective options available to halt the problem, and how to talk about obesity prevention policy in an effective way. See how the piece highlights the CHOICES model:

“…Over the past two years, Harvard Chan’s Steve Gortmaker and his colleagues have been working with state health departments in Alaska, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Washington, and West Virginia and with the city of Philadelphia and other locales, building cost-effectiveness models using local data for a wide variety of interventions—from improved early child care to healthy school environments to communitywide campaigns. “We collaborate with health departments and community stakeholders, provide them with the evidence base, help assess how much different options cost, model the results over a decade, and they pick what they want to work on. One constant that we’ve seen—and these are very different political environments—is a strong interest in cost-effectiveness,” he says… Gortmaker is one of the leaders of a collaborative modeling effort known as CHOICES—for Childhood Obesity Intervention Cost-Effectiveness Study—an acronym that seems a pointed rebuttal to the reflexive conservative argument that government regulation tramples individual choice.” Read the full article here.