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Webinar Title

Sugar and Oral Health Messaging: Implications for PSE Change

Description

In this webinar, Dr. Kearns will argue that dental caries prevention must be understood not just as a health issue, but as a contested political issue influenced by powerful vested interests. She will demonstrate ways in which the sugar industry has influenced dental professionals and will make recommendations related to increasing engagement in advocacy.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how "problem definition" claims are contested when policy issues are controversial
• Identify problem definition claims about dental caries originating from the sugar industry
• Describe sugar industry tactics to disseminate problem definition claims

Presenter

Dr. Kearns is an Associate Professor in the University of California, San Francisco School of Dentistry and Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. She is one of the first academics to rigorously study the influence of the sugar industry on health. She first saw the devastating effects of sugar as a dental director for clinics serving low-income populations and as a manager of dental operations at the Kaiser Permanente Dental Care Program. She has helped identify 600,000 pages of food industry-related documents now available online to researchers and the public in the UCSF Library Food Industry Documents Archive.