The CHOICES Childhood Obesity National Action Kit was updated this week to include an additional strategy in the school setting: Promoting water consumption in schools. In addition, several of the strategies across all four settings now contain more direct links to implementation information, which can be found in each strategy’s More Info section. We hope these updates will help further inform users when making decisions about reducing childhood obesity.
About the CHOICES Childhood Obesity National Action Kit
The CHOICES team has projected the national population reach, impact on health, implementation costs, and health care cost savings for 15 effective strategies across multiple settings – including schools, early care and out of school time, communities, and clinical. These include strategies to increase time children spend being physically active during the school day, policies to reduce access to unhealthy foods and drinks, and initiatives to increase physical activity in early care and afterschool programs.
The menu of strategies presented in the kit have strong evidence for helping children to grow up at a healthy weight by promoting, for example, increased time spent being physically active in school, reducing exposure to advertising of unhealthy foods and drinks, and reducing consumption of sugary drinks.
The kit can help state and local health agencies and federal agencies choose and implement best-value for money strategies to prevent childhood obesity. The kit can also help inform state and local decision-makers (mayors, city councils, legislators, governors), public health and/or community leaders, researchers and others looking for strong evidence on strategies and the resources needed for their implementation. A number of communities have selected strategies in the action kit to explore their cost-effectiveness with the CHOICES team and some have then used that data to inform decision-making regarding implementation, such as electronic decision support for pediatric medical providers in Denver.