Monday, October 27, 2014

Guess What? Childhood Obesity Won't be Solved By Healthy Corner Stores Alone.

And no, the study wasn't published in the Journal of Duh, it was published in Obesity and it explored the impact of corner stores stocking healthy foods alongside all the junk on the obesity rates of surrounding schools' 4th-6th graders over the course of 2 years.

And, shocker, the singular intervention of stocking healthy foods alongside chips, candy, and soda in corner stores didn't all by itself lead the surrounding 9-11 year olds to lose weight.

Yet that didn't stop The Obesity Society from tweeting out,
I found this tweet incredibly frustrating as by definition complex problems won't be solved by way of singular interventions, and of all folks The Obesity Society ought to know that.

I'm not suggesting there's an easy solution, but we need to figure out a better way to consider single sandbags than to design (or publicize) studies that invariably will show them to be incapable on their own of stemming a flood.