STRIPED fights to make eating disorders a public health priority
A new video from the American Public Health Association (APHA) features the work of the Strategic Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders (STRIPED).
The eight-and-a-half-minute video, titled “Eating Disorders Are Public Health,” was published on Oct. 27. It is part of the APHA’s national Thought Leadership Film Series.
“Eating disorders are a public health issue because they are common, they are deadly, and they are expensive,” said STRIPED Director S. Bryn Austin, professor in Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, in the opening of the video. She said that when she started in the public health field, she found that eating disorders were hardly ever addressed. The focus was on making kids more resilient—but not on tackling the structural factors that could lead to eating disorders. She said, “If we were dealing with environmental pollutants, particulates in the air, we wouldn’t just put gas masks on kids and say, ‘Go out and play.’ We would clean up the air.”
Austin decided to create STRIPED, a research and training program based at Harvard Chan School and Boston Children’s Hospital, to deal with the problem. STRIPED gathers evidence about the health impacts of eating disorders, and the team works with community partners, public health professionals, hospitals, clinicians, and policymakers to put the group’s findings into practice, noted Ariel Beccia, a STRIPED faculty member and an instructor in the Department of Epidemiology, who also appears in the video.
STRIPED enlists the help of young people who’ve had experiences with eating disorders. Several of these youth advocates, including Ryan Ahmed and Isabella Man, spoke about their work with STRIPED in the video. By telling their own stories, they helped push through legislation in both New York and California to put age restrictions on the sale of over-the-counter diet pills and muscle-building supplements, which are weakly regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and can cause serious health problems.
The video also describes STRIPED’s efforts to reinstate data on eating disorders in the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS)—“the most important nationally representative survey of adolescent health,” Austin said. The YRBS dropped questions about the topic in 2013, and, as Beccia noted, it took a decade-long and multi-sector coalition to bring those questions back. When new data became available, it was alarming, Beccia said. “We were seeing really high prevalence and really stark inequities” in eating disorders, she said.
“Our goal,” said Austin, “is that every public health school and program in the country would cover eating disorders to create a world where girls, boys, and people of all genders can grow up at home in their own bodies.”
Watch the APHA video:
Eating Disorders Are Public Health
Learn more:
Binge eating common among U.S. high schoolers, study finds (Harvard Chan School news)
