Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Jan 3, 2019
Date Accepted: Feb 6, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Text Mining of United States Obesity-Related Public Policies: Systematic Document Search
Background:
Obesity has become a worldwide health problem, caused by multiple and complex factors. To face this challenge, governments have played a central role in combating its rise. Considering this, public policies are introduced or enacted for the benefit of whole populations, taking into account the perspective of multiverse social stakeholders based on solid scientific fundamentals.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to examine obesity-related public policies in the United States and the District of Columbia, in order to understand their scientific basis.
Methods:
We analyzed the public policies implemented in the United States from 2003 to 2013, during which time the largest number of obesity-related public policies were introduced, using text mining.
Results:
In total, 1592 obesity-related public policies were retrieved from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Multidisciplinary policies were predominant in the documents analyzed (533/1592, 33.5%), followed by health sciences (454/1592, 28.5%), social sciences (330/1592, 20.7%), life sciences (240/1592, 15.1%), and physical sciences (35/1592, 2.2%). Throughout the country, most policies were community oriented (1082/1865, 58.0%) and many of them were related to school and family environments (447/1865, 24.0%), early care and education (75/1865, 4.0%), hospitals (63/1865, 3.4%), and workplaces (47/1865, 2.5%).
Conclusions:
The contents of obesity-related public policies were generally uniformly framed across the United States. They were generally based on scientific references, in which there was a predominance of multidisciplinary research. These findings are consistent with what is known about the multiple factors causing obesity and about the methods being developed to control the epidemic.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.