Imagine if the back of every soda can was labelled “five miles of walking” with a graphic of a walking stick figure. Would you think twice about purchasing that soda? This is the hypothetical question Stephanie Chan—a rising Harvard College sophomore—posed in her recently published podcast. Chan crafted the podcast as her final project for Faculty Director Sue J. Goldie’s Harvard College course, “Global Health Challenges: Complexities of Evidence-Based Policy” in Spring 2017.
The course required students to create a problem-inspired product, or a written or multimedia project related to a global health issue that could be disseminated to and consumed by a target audience beyond the university itself. Chan crafted a professional, well-informed media piece that successfully brought the innovative final assignment to life. With the guidance of her teaching fellow, Dr. Renzo Guinto, Chan identified and pitched her work to NCDFREE, an organization leveraging creative strategies to raise awareness worldwide about chronic diseases.
The podcast, titled “Nutrition Labeling,” encourages food manufacturers to more clearly label packages with nutrition facts. In addition to posing this provocative labelling solution, Chan situates this proposal within the context of the obesity epidemic, specifically pointing out the potential impact for particularly vulnerable populations such as African Americans and low-income populations. Beyond serving as a public service announcement, the podcast is a research-based call-to-action for nutrition literacy, citing work from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health showing that clearer food labeling has the power of changing consumption behavior.