Obesity poses one of the greatest public health challenges of the 21st century, creating serious health, economic, and social consequences for individuals and society. Despite acceleration in efforts to characterize, comprehend, and act on this problem, including implementation of preventive interventions, further understanding is needed on the progress and effectiveness of these interventions. Evaluating Obesity Prevention Efforts develops a concise and actionable plan for measuring the nation's progress in obesity prevention efforts-specifically, the success of policy and environmental strategies recommended in the 2012 IOM report Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation. This book offers a framework that will provide guidance for systematic and routine planning, implementation, and evaluation of the advancement of obesity prevention efforts. This framework is for specific use with the goals and strategies from the 2012 report and can be used to assess the progress made in every community and throughout the country, with the ultimate goal of reducing the obesity epidemic. It offers potentially valuable guidance in improving the quality and effect of the actions being implemented. The recommendations of Evaluating Obesity Prevention Efforts focus on efforts to increase the likelihood that actions taken to prevent obesity will be evaluated, that their progress in accelerating the prevention of obesity will be monitored, and that the most promising practices will be widely disseminated.

This Surgeon General's report details the causes and the consequences of tobacco use among youth and young adults by focusing on the social, environmental, advertising, and marketing influences that encourage youth and young adults to initiate and sustain tobacco use. This is the first time tobacco data on young adults as a discrete population have been explored in detail. The report also highlights successful strategies to prevent young people from using tobacco

Focuses on today’s major public health concerns to teach students the principles of population health behavior and behavior change. The single greatest way to improve health and quality of life is not by developing new medical approaches, but by addressing harmful personal behaviors. These behaviors—which include tobacco, alcohol, and drug use, diet, and physical activity—play a significant role in the risk for and development, treatment, and management of the most common causes of disease, disability, and death in the modern world. Health Behavior Change in Populations is designed to teach students and practitioners strategic principles for creating positive behavioral change on a population level. With an emphasis on the application of theory and research to practice, this textbook presents current and future public health professionals with a range of methods geared towards helping people make healthy choices, from informing the individual to modifying the surroundings and circumstances that drive decision-making. Written and edited by experts in the health professions, the book is arranged into three sections: State of the Field, State of the Science, and Cross-Cutting Issues. The chapters within these sections include learning objectives with boldfaced keywords and a glossary of terms. Each chapter addresses • The magnitude of the public health burden • Key determinants and conceptual framework for behaviors and behavior change, including individual, familial, interpersonal, community, sociocultural, structural, and political perspectives • Current evidence-based interventions and best practices • Roles for key stakeholders, including health plans, employers/workplace, health departments/agencies, sectors such as recreational and agricultural, policymakers, community groups/advocates, clinics/clinicians, researchers, and funding institutions • Considerations for implementation, evaluation, and translation

Applied Exercise Psychology emphasizes the application of evidence-based knowledge drawn from the fields of exercise psychology, health psychology, clinical and counseling psychology, and exercise physiology for physical activity behavior change. The book provides readers with: theoretical bases for understanding and promoting physical activity behavior; interventions to use for facilitating physical activity behavior change and the tools for measuring the effectiveness of these interventions; cross-cultural considerations for practitioners to ensure multicultural competency; considerations to guide best practices with special populations (e.g., persons with medical conditions and persons with mental health conditions); overall applied implications and future directions. The collection builds a bridge between up-to-date research findings, relevant field experiences, and applied implications. This is the first book to cover such breadth of topics in applied exercise psychology, with chapters bringing often overlooked issues to the attention of practitioners to promote not only evidence-based practice but also responsible ethics and referral.