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What’s Your Domestic Health Policy?

By: NWHF Staff | Posted on: May 18th, 2011 | 1 comments | Share:
Categories: Environmental Health • Policies & Laws • Food & Nutrition • Public Health

Photo by Kyle Jensen, 16, for NWHF Youth Photo Contest

By Craig Mosbaek, CHP Contributing Writer

When advocating for policies that promote health, we usually think of reaching out to the elected officials in state legislatures and city or county commissions.  However, policies can be implemented by other institutions, such as schools and businesses.

And, yes, also into your home.

A recent column in The Oregonian urged readers to write their own Clean Air Act for the home.  The YOU Docs, recommended that families “ban the No. 1 cause of home air pollution, cigarette smoke. It’s the single largest source of particulate pollution inside homes.”

Like a lot of families, mine bans smoking in our home, and there are a couple other policy solutions we have tried. 

A few months back we made a rule that sodas (and other sugar-sweetened beverages) had to be stored in the basement.

Since it now requires a little more thought and effort, we drink less soda.  I considered conducting an evaluation to assess the impact of this policy, but I was too embarrassed to collect baseline data on how much we drank before the policy. 

Some of you are saying “don’t have any soda in the house!”  Well, we used that strategy for TV watching. In January 2010, we moved to Washington, DC for a year and sold all our TVs.  We almost bought a TV as the Winter Olympics started, but things were going so well without one.  I read more books than ever that year.

We knew we would eventually get a TV but still held off for a couple months after our return to Portland.  I wanted to make sure that our TV watching habits had been broken.  We finally bought one a couple weekends ago, and we watched the Sunday night news. 

We did not watch TV again for four days.

When looking to pass a policy at the state or local level, politics plays a key role.  You may have heard that politics is all about relationships.  So lobbying your family or housemates to get a policy implemented at home should be easy, right? 

I think that discussion will have to wait. (-;

But what about you? Have you attempted policy changes in the home?

What are your successes ... or failures?

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Craig Mosbaek is a health policy consultant living in Portland. He recently returned from Washington, D.C., where he was an American Public Health Association fellow serving the House Committee on Ways and Means.