Examining Compliance with a Statewide Law Banning Junk Food and Beverage Marketing in Maine Schools

Abstract

Policy development is an important and powerful tool to promote health and welfare in society, yet the process of adopting policies is rarely evaluated for compliance, and studies examining policy impact sometimes neglect to verify the extent to which the policy interventions are faithful to the policy's original intent.Evaluations can lead to critical improvements and improve success in achieving intended goals.In this article, Polacsek et al. present a simple yet elegant evaluation of Maine's law to limit the marketing of foods of minimal nutritional value in public school settings.Their findings underscore the need to perform such evaluations to inform enforcement efforts and assess impact.