title: Social Entrepreneurship for Obesity Prevention: What Are the Opportunities?
abstract: In recent years, social entrepreneurship has emerged as a new field to address social and public health challenges. Social entrepreneurship, which harnesses traditional business practices and market forces to address social challenges, may produce solutions that are more cost-effective and sustainable than those produced by governmental and nonprofit sectors. In this paper, we discuss whether and how social entrepreneurship can be harnessed for obesity prevention by defining and briefly reviewing the rise of social entrepreneurship in the USA, outlining the threat that obesity poses to US society and offering some examples of how social ventures are addressing the problem of obesity. Additional untapped opportunities are also discussed and recommendations given for how social entrepreneurship might impact obesity prevention in the future.
authors.affiliation: Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. tosha.smith@gmail.com.|Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. tosha.smith@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Tosha Woods
authors.initials: TW
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. lcalancie@unc.edu.|Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. lcalancie@unc.edu.
authors.forename: Larissa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Calancie
authors.affiliation: Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. alice_ammerman@unc.edu.|Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. alice_ammerman@unc.edu.
authors.forename: Alice
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ammerman
mesh_terms: D003132:Commerce; D016520:Entrepreneurship; D006801:Humans; D009765:Obesity / Q000517:prevention & control*
keywords: Evidence-based intervention; Obesity prevention; Social entrepreneurship; Social innovation