Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Food Marketing Research Roundtable

April 4-5, 2011

Academy for Educational Development
1825 Connecticut Ave., NW, 8th Floor
Washington, DC 20009

This Roundtable meeting, co-sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR), included representatives from NCCOR funding partners: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), RWJF and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It also included researchers, advocates, research funders, federal agencies and policy makers concerned with food marketing to children and youth.  Roundtable discussions were facilitated by David Britt, Mary Story and Ellen Wartella.

This Roundtable was an important turning point in our collective work to identify, evaluate and spread policies and practices needed to reduce children’s exposure to unhealthy food marketing. It’s been roughly five years since the Institute of Medicine’s seminal report, Food Marketing to Children and Youth, which concluded that youth-focused food and beverage marketing practices were out of balance with a healthful diet and contributed to an environment that placed children’s lifelong health at risk.

That report, based on a CDC-funded review, generated timely recommendations for research and policy action to dramatically tip the balance towards healthier food marketing. The Roundtable began with a review of progress towards achieving those recommendations, and a discussion of the research, action and advocacy most needed now to guide RWJF’s goal of reversing the rise in childhood obesity by 2015, and NCCOR’s efforts beginning last year to halt -- and reverse -- the epidemic through strategic research coordination and collaboration. 

The overarching purpose of this third Research Roundtable was to help research and advocacy communities, RWJF, NCCOR and relevant federal agencies identify and advance the next wave of strategic research needed to generate lasting improvement in food marketing.  Participants pulled together lessons for the future from what we have and have not accomplished since the IOM report, looked across the spectrum of current cutting-edge research relevant to policy makers and advocates, and solicited research and policy action priorities for the next 2-5 years. In addition, participants outlined practical strategies for continuing the networking and research monitoring begun in past Roundtables, including through regular conference calls and webinars.