Food and eating environments likely contribute to the increasing epidemic of obesity and chronic diseases, over and above individual factors such as knowledge, skills, and motivation. Environmental and policy interventions may be among the most effective strategies for creating population-wide improvements in eating. This review describes an ecological framework for conceptualizing the many food environments and conditions that influence food choices, with an emphasis on current knowledge regarding the home, child care, school, work site, retail store, and restaurant settings. Important issues of disparities in food access for low-income and minority groups and macrolevel issues are also reviewed. The status of measurement and evaluation of nutrition environments and the need for action to improve health are highlighted.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.29.020907.090926

Creating Healthy Food and Eating Environments: Policy and Environmental Approaches

This paper presents an information-processing model that is directly applicable to the investigation of how mediated messages are processed. It applies the model to the case of television viewing to demonstrate its applicability. It provides a measure for each part of the model. It presents evidence that supports the model in the television-viewing situation. Finally, it demonstrates how the model may be used to further research and understanding in well-known theoretical traditions. This model is not meant to stand in opposition to any of these theories but, rather, should work well with them by providing hypothesized mechanisms that may underlie well-known effects. This model should prove useful both to researchers and, eventually, to message producers. To the extent that we can better understand how the content and structure of messages interact with a viewer's information-processing system to determine which parts and how much of a communication message is remembered, we will make great strides in understanding how people communicate.

The limited capacity model of mediated message processing

In the 117th Shattuck Lecture, Dr. Steven Schroeder asks why the American system fails to deliver a standard of health similar to that observed in many other countries. In his arguments, he focuses on the public health risks of smoking and obesity and how they have been managed.

https://www.nptinternal.org/productions/chcv2/prevention/pdf/NEJM%20We%20Can%20Do%20Better.pdf

We Can Do Better — Improving the Health of the American People

One-third of adults are now obese, and children's obesity rates have climbed from 5 to 17 percent in the past 30 years. The causes of the nation's obesity epidemic are multi-factorial, having much more to do with the absence of sidewalks and the limited availability of healthy and affordable foods than a lack of personal responsibility. The broad societal changes that are needed to prevent obesity will inevitably affect activity and eating environments and settings for all ages. Many aspects of the obesity problem have been identified and discussed; however, there has not been complete agreement on what needs to be done to accelerate progress. Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention reviews previous studies and their recommendations and presents five key recommendations to accelerate meaningful change on a societal level during the next decade. The report suggests recommendations and strategies that, independently, can accelerate progress, but urges a systems approach of many strategies working in concert to maximize progress in accelerating obesity prevention.The recommendations in Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention include major reforms in access to and opportunities for physical activity; widespread reductions in the availability of unhealthy foods and beverages and increases in access to healthier options at affordable, competitive prices; an overhaul of the messages that surround Americans through marketing and education with respect to physical activity and food consumption; expansion of the obesity prevention support structure provided by health care providers, insurers, and employers; and schools as a major national focal point for obesity prevention. The report calls on all individuals, organizations, agencies, and sectors that do or can influence physical activity and nutrition environments to assess and begin to act on their potential roles as leaders in obesity prevention.

Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation

This paper applies the limited capacity model of motivated mediated messages (LC4MP) to the problem of creating effective messages about cancer. A general description of the model is presented and then applied specifically to the task of creating effective cancer communication messages by asking the following questions about cancer communication: (a) What is the goal of the message? (b) Who is in the target market? (c) What medium will carry the message? and (d) What is the motivational and personal relevance of the main information in the message for the majority of people in the target market? The paper concludes that cancer is a motivationally relevant topic that will elicit aversive activation. Target markets for various types of cancer-related messages (e.g., smokers or people of a certain age) will process mediated messages in predictably different ways making certain design decisions better for certain target markets. Both structural and content elements of messages interact with the limited capacity information processing system to impact resource allocation, which in turn determines how well messages are encoded, stored, and retrieved at a decision point. Individual differences in peoples’ motivational activation influence both their tendencies to engage in risky behaviors that increase the probabilities of getting cancer and their processing of health-related messages. Future research from this perspective should be done to optimize cancer messages for specific target audiences using specific media.

Using the Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing to Design Effective Cancer Communication Messages

This study examines the effect of the rate of edits (camera changes in the same visual scene) on viewers' arousal and memory. The rate of edits varied from slow to very fast. Results show that as the rate of edits increases physiological arousal, self-reported arousal, and memory increase. It is suggested that edits can increase attention to and encoding of television message content without significantly increasing the cognitive load of the message.

The Effects of Edits on Arousal, Attention, and Memory for Television Messages: When an Edit Is an Edit Can an Edit Be Too Much?

As the fight against childhood obesity escalates, the issue of food advertising to children has come under increasing scrutiny. Policymakers in Congress, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and agencies such as the Institute of Medicine (IOM) have called for changes in the advertising landscape, and U.S. food and media industries are developing their own voluntary initiatives related to advertising food to children. To help inform this debate, the Kaiser Family Foundation released the largest study ever conducted of TV food advertising to children. The study combines content analysis of TV ads with detailed data about children?s viewing habits to provide an estimate of the number and type of TV ads seen by children of various ages.

Food for thought: television food advertising to children in the United States

Objectives. We sought to document the frequency, circumstances, and consequences of prescription medication–sharing behaviors and to use a medication-sharing impact framework to organize the resulting data regarding medication-loaning and -borrowing practices.Methods. One-on-one interviews were conducted in 2006, and participants indicated (1) prescription medicine taken in the past year, (2) whether they had previously loaned or borrowed prescription medicine, (3) scenarios in which they would consider loaning or borrowing prescription medicine, and (4) the types of prescription medicines they had loaned or borrowed.Results. Of the 700 participants, 22.9% reported having loaned their medications to someone else and 26.9% reported having borrowed someone else’s prescription. An even greater proportion of participants reported situations in which medication sharing was acceptable to them.Conclusions. Sharing prescription medication places individuals at risk for diverse consequences, and further research r...

Beyond abuse and exposure: framing the impact of prescription-medication sharing.

Two experiments, one with college students and one with older participants, examine how the addition of text and animated graphics influence the processing of television news stories. Recall data suggest graphics help younger and older viewers store and retrieve information presented in television news stories. Graphics also enhanced encoding of harder stories for younger viewers but not older viewers. The recognition and heart rate data indicate that older viewers engage in more controlled processing of television messages, whereas college students process television in a more automatic fashion.

Picture This: Effects of Graphics on the Processing of Television News

This article investigates how sensation seeking and age influence televison viewers' online information processing of substance-abuse public service announcements (PSAs). College students and adolescents viewed 30 PSAs that varied in terms of arousing content and production pacing. Dependent variables included substance use, self-reported emotional responses (valence and arousal), physiological responses (heart rate and skin conductance response), and recognition. Results show that high-sensation seekers prefer all messages, remember more, and exhibit lower arousal compared to low-sensation seekers. Adolescents remember more information from the PSAs than college students. All participants exhibit cognitive overload at the same point in time.

Nancy Schwartz

Papers

The Effects of Edits on Arousal, Attention, and Memory for Television Messages: When an Edit Is an Edit Can an Edit Be Too Much?

Food for thought: television food advertising to children in the United States

Beyond abuse and exposure: framing the impact of prescription-medication sharing.

Picture This: Effects of Graphics on the Processing of Television News

It's an Arousing, Fast-Paced Kind of World: The Effects of Age and Sensation Seeking on the Information Processing of Substance-Abuse PSAs