Abstract
BackgroundChildhood obesity remains a significant global problem with immediate and long-term individual health and societal consequences. Targets for change should include the most potent and predictive factors for obesity at all levels of the personal, social and physical environments. The Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living (‘the Center’) is a public-private partnership that was developed to address child health issues through research, service, and education. This overview paper introduces a special issue of seven articles on childhood obesity from the Center, and the implications of this research for obesity prevention.Methods and resultsA review of the literature on public-private partnerships was undertaken and key components of the partnership between the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and the Center were compared for compatibility. The conceptual framework for Center research, based on social cognitive theory and the social-ecological model, is explained. An overview of papers in this special issue, relative to the conceptual framework, and the implications of this research for childhood obesity prevention, are provided.ConclusionsThe public-private partnership that created the Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living has been instrumental in motivating the Center’s academic faculty to focus their research on improvements in child, family and community health through etiologic, epidemiologic, methodologic and intervention research. This special issue extends this work and places particular emphasis on socioeconomic inequalities in addressing the obesity problem in the U.S. and worldwide.
Highlights
Childhood obesity remains a significant global problem with immediate and long-term individual health and societal consequences
Research at the Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living In the area of child health, research at the Center has been guided by two primary conceptual orientations
The individual is at the center of influence, and intra-personal influences, social-environmental influences, the physical environment, and the policy environment progressively and directly influence individual behavior, as well as affect other more proximal influences, which in turn influence behavior
Summary
Childhood obesity remains a significant global problem with immediate and long-term individual health and societal consequences. Numerous studies have addressed both causes and solutions to the childhood obesity epidemic, much remains to be discerned The purpose of this special issue of the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity is to further our understanding of the health consequences, epidemiology, etiological factors, and effective programs and policies that are relevant to the epidemic, and to provide resources and succinct, evidence-based, comprehensive, and instructive knowledge for future research and practice. Ongoing updates of the knowledge base of the childhood obesity epidemic are important and urgent due to the rapid increase in the prevalence of obesity in both developed and developing countries during the last 30–40 years, despite countless initiatives and research to address childhood obesity This topic has received considerable attention, substantive gaps in the literature remain. Starting around 1980, a notable increase in the prevalence of obesity (>30 BMI in adults) was observed, and this increase has continued to occur in both adults and children worldwide [4]
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