Soft drink consumption has increased by 300% in the past 20 years.
Research Projects
At Upstream, we seek to find evidence-based answers to public health challenges. Before advocating for any given policy, we investigate a broad range of impacts and opportunities for the solution at hand. After we conduct initial research on issues, we often engage communities to examine the impact of specific policies on groups' health in an approach called a Health Impact Assessment.
What's a Health Impact Assessment?
Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is formally defined as a combination of procedures, methods and tools that systematically judges the potential, and sometimes unintended effects of a proposed project, plan or policy on the health of a population and the distribution of those effects within the population. HIA identifies appropriate actions to manage those effects (adapted from the IAIA, 2006).
See the Health Impact Project and the Human Impact Project for more information.
Our current research projects include:
"Simply put, in the absence of a radical shift towards prevention and public health, we will not be successful in containing medical costs or empowering the health of the American people."