What the U.S. can learn about treating childhood obesity from Latin America
Download mp3 (11.47 MB)Childhood obesity continues to be a significant concern in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say between 2017 and 2020, nearly a fifth of 2- to 19 year-olds were obese. That totals more than 14 million kids and adolescents.
New research examines policies the U.S. could implement to bring those numbers down. And it doesn’t need to look too far to find them. Latin American countries have successfully implemented warning labels, taxes, advertising restrictions and portion control initiatives.
Lucía Félix Beltrán is a senior policy fellow at the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at UCLA, and one of the authors of the study.
Beltrán joined The Show to talk about how a number of Latin American countries take a pretty different approach to dealing with this problem than we do here in the United States.
