Helping Communities Assess Their Progress in Preventing
Childhood Obesity  Developing a set of measures to evaluate
community-based childhood obesity prevention programs  Although
many communities are implementing interventions to prevent and
reduce childhood obesity, the field lacks ways to measure their
impact.  From 2007 through 2009, a team at the Division of
Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified 24 community-
level strategies to prevent childhood obesity, and paired each
with a measure for evaluating its success. These strategies and
measures—which focus on physical activity and healthy eating—are
designed to help communities assess their progress and to help
researchers compare the impact of different interventions.
Project staff produced Recommended Community Strategies and
Measurements to Prevent Obesity in the United States:
Implementation and Measurement Guide. The guide includes
examples of communities that have implemented each