medicine, and biomedical engineering/instrumentation. PsycINFO is a database of psychological literature and it contains more than 1,900,000 records including citations and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books, and technical reports, as well as citations to dissertations, all in the field of psychology and psychological aspects of related disciplines. Medline is the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s bibliographic database, covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences. PubMed, provides online access to over 12 million Medline citations. Medline contains bibliographic citations and author abstracts from more than 4,600 biomedical journals published in the United States and 70 other countries.

The initial search strategy paired the terms obesity and overweight with terms related to food access (neighborhoods, supermarkets, grocery stores, farmers’ markets, breastfeeding, menu labeling, after-school programs, youth programs, community gardens, federal food programs), and terms related to physical activity, including topics concerning the built environment (recreation, parks, playgrounds, planning, sprawl, zoning, walkability, paths, trails) and transportation (sidewalks, roads, traffic patterns, safety, complete streets).

A scan also was conducted to identify recommended childhood obesity prevention actions that have been undertaken in the last ten years by organizations that work with local governments. These organizations included the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Leadership for Healthy Communities, International City/County Management Association (ICMA), National League of Cities, National Association of Counties (NACo), Local Government Commission, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), Prevention Institute, U.S Conference of Mayors, and National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO). These organizations have all published reports and/or toolkits that discuss what local governments can do to prevent childhood obesity. The committee also reviewed several sets of criteria and tools developed by others that could be relevant to the committee’s task of making determinations on the most promising actions. (A list of these resources can be found in Appendix B.)

In addition, the committee invited presentations from experts on the role of local government in childhood obesity prevention (see Appendix F).

Based on these searches and presentations, a broad spectrum of action steps and the research on them was compiled. These actions clustered around 15 distinct strategies.