Nutrition Policy Institute's director and cooperative extension specialist Lorrene Ritchie and colleagues published a new study suggesting that efforts to prevent childhood obesity may be more effective when community programs and policies are both intensive and are implemented in multiple settings in which children live, learn, and play. This finding has important implications for practitioners, suggesting that to be effective communities need to plan a sufficient number of programs and policies of higher intensity (i.e. longer duration, fuller reach, and greater strength of strategies) among multiple settings where children can be exposed to these interventions. The study was published in Preventing Chronic Disease on May 7, 2020 by lead author Vicki Collie-Akers from the University of Kansas Medical Center along with co-authors Stephen Fawcett, Jerry Schultz, Kandace Fleming and Rebecca Swinburne Romine also from the University of Kansas, as well as Edward Frongillo from the University of South Carolina, and Sonia Arteaga from the National Institutes of Health. Study data were collected in 2013-2015 from 130 communities across the United States as part of the in the cross-sectional Healthy Communities Study, a six-year observational study funded by the National Institutes of Health.