Faculty Abstracts

School Environments & Childhood Overweight

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to examine school environments and in particular, pouring rights contracts and how this relates to childhood overweight from a critical theory perspective.

Conclusions: Pouring rights contracts provide a profit to powerful mega-corporations at the expense of children health. There is a need to move beyond a solely individual approach to addressing childhood overweight and involve a social ecology approach. This would involve a push for social change including removal of soda machines from schools and a change from marketing practices targeted at children.

Practical Implication: Nurses are poised in the community in situations to actively affect social changes to improve health outcomes of our nation’s most vulnerable people, but nurses must get involved.