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Childhood Obesity Prevention — A Promising New Method for Tackling the Epidemic

By: Matt Longjohn, Amy Sheon

As we begin again to consider health care reform in this nation, the issue of childhood obesity should not be ignored. Childhood obesity is a public health epidemic with serious ramifications for health, productivity, and long-term health care system costs. As the epidemic grows, there is an increasingly urgent need for accurate population-based data to understand obesity prevalence, trends, and disparities among youth. Thousands of obesity intervention programs are under way across the country, yet very few datasets are available to evaluate their long-term effectiveness. Indeed, lack of data even ...