Addressing the Issue of Obesity in the US Term Paper

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Developing an Advocacy Campaign That Addresses Obesity

Obesity is a serious public health issue and is even considered an epidemic by many health care professionals that affects all populations—old, young, men, women and children, regardless of demographic or location (Mitchell, Catenacci, Wyatt & Hill, 2011). To address this issue, several public advocacy campaigns have been developed. Healthy People 2020, for instance, under the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, is currently advocating to raise awareness about obesity and how to reduce the rising rates of it in the U.S. This paper will examine two scholarly articles about advocacy campaigns centered on fighting obesity, what they say, and what takeaways can be identified to help develop an effective advocacy campaign in the future.

The first article by Giang, Karpyn, Laurison, Hillier and Perry (2008) examines the effectiveness of the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative, which was designed to “bring awareness and policy change to the issue” of a lack of supermarket fresh foods in underserved areas (p. 272). In other words, it focused on addressing the grocery gap to help poorer communities obtain the kind of healthy, fresh food conducive to a diet that combats obesity. A key component of the advocacy campaign was “the creation of an evidence-based report that served as a strong, credible foundation for the campaign”—i.e., the situation/environment was researched, analyzed and tested to create a program that used evidence to support its directive. Evidence instead of ideology was the critical nexus of the campaign because it provided the advocacy leaders with an accurate picture of the real problems that needed to be addressed (specifically how to fight obesity in poor regions) and how to solve them (provide financing to help bring access to healthy foods to these regions).

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The evidence-based directive allowed the campaign to be a success, as it rightly identified the problem and the put into place an effective solution.

The second article by Doroghazi (2015) examines advocacy campaigns focused on fighting obesity in general and provided a critical analysis of one detrimental factor common to those that fail—namely the fact that they focus too much on blame and pseudo-causes of obesity instead of on the actual science of obesity (such as metabolism rates, how they vary among individuals, how personal responsibility is a major factor in the spread of obesity, etc.). The study shows that in order for an advocacy campaign to be most effective, it has to refrain from shifting blame for the disease from both the body and the way people individually respond to the body to environmental factors that are extraneous to the issue if considered in the proper context (such as the fact that fast food establishments in and of themselves do not cause obesity but rather that individuals whose body metabolism is not high and who consume too much of the fast food products is what leads to obesity—i.e., there is a lack of understanding of one’s own body and its needs and a lack of control/responsibility in terms of being accountable for one’s own decisions). The study is helpful in showing that advocacy campaigns should target the….....

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