Overcoming the High Cost of Cheap Drinks: Getting Californians to Rethink What They Drink

Background: Childhood obesity is reaching crisis proportions, overwhelming the health care system and impacting children’s lives. Since 1980 the number of obese children in the United States has more than tripled, and obesity now rivals smoking as the largest cause of preventable death and disease. A major culprit fueling today’s childhood obesity epidemic, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, is overconsumption of soda and other sugary drinks. Reducing the amount of sugary beverages people drink is an important strategy to reversing the obesity epidemic.

Program background: In California, where nearly a third of children are overweight, the Network for a Healthy California has launched “ReThink Your Drink” (RYD) efforts to address aggressive marketing of sugary drinks and improve drinking behaviors. Rather than a top-down model, the Network’s efforts have been entirely organic. The statewide organization has seeded RYD efforts in nine regional collaboratives throughout the state, providing essential communications tools, training, educational and promotional materials and messages as well as encouraging each collaborative to develop unique approaches that reflect local priorities, resources and opportunities. With minimal budget and staff, the Network’s role has been to inspire, energize and coordinate these efforts while fostering integration of efforts throughout the state to maximize efficiencies and outcomes.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Unique and creative RYD efforts have been staged in every part of the state, addressing a variety of issues and drawing widespread community interest and support. The success of the RYD campaign is evaluated on three levels: membership recruitment, community reach and policy change.

• MEMBERSHIP: Since the collaboratives adopted RYD efforts, membership in regional collaboratives has grown to over 1,200 members, drawing increasingly diverse members from county health departments, health providers, schools, WIC, First 5 Commissions, and local businesses and universities. These expanded members bring power, clout, resources, perspective and reach to the program.
• REACH: Without a paid promotional program, the RYD efforts are wholly reliant on earned media and member efforts. Despite this reality, the campaigns have directly reached 2,436,000 citizens through their “Sugary Savvy Trainings” and earned over 7.7 million media impressions for their special events, messages, meetings and commissioned studies.
• POLICIES: To provide sustainability, RYD is dedicated to changing local policies and environments. Throughout the state, over 100 city, county and organizational policies have been adopted to improve access to healthy beverages while reducing availability of sugary drinks.

Conclusions: With more than $500 million spent each year to encourage children to consume sugary drinks, changing beverage consumption behaviors is no easy task. However, through the collective action of passionate members and a regionalized approach supported at the state level, California RYD efforts have made significant inroads and laid the groundwork for behavioral change by educating consumers and passing policies that improve the beverage environment in the state.

Implications for research and/or practice: Limited resources, enormous competition and daunting odds need not stop health communicators from tackling important subjects. Instead, by seeding local programs with materials, training and technical assistance, and encouraging them to address a common issue from a purely local perspective, health communicators can begin to realize significant community change.