Question

What are some concerns related to an over-focus on food policies to address obesity? What are some additional policies that could be developed and implemented to address obesity?

Answer 1

1) • Current public health dreams around obesity prevention are starting to replicate an understanding of the energy of public coverage and environmental exchange to have an impact on each individual- and population-level behavioral exchange while acknowledging the importance of merchandising populace food security as section of such efforts. Implementation of public policy at a macrolevel, such as local, state, or federal legislation, is an high quality and comprehensive capability to affect trade in population behavior. Policy-level modifications have an impact on the environments that consequently have an effect on the behavior and picks of individuals. Effective public fitness coverage and environmental trade can encourage populations to practice more healthful behavior . That is, wonderful policies can alternate environments to have multiplied get right of entry to (and lower costs) to more healthy meals and to due to this fact make the healthful preference the convenient or default desire .

• The Nutrition and Weight Status objectives recognized for Healthy People 2020 are founded on an overarching aim to promote fitness and minimize continual ailment chance thru healthful diets and preservation of wholesome body weights . The referred to targets emphasize that efforts to improve weight-reduction plan and limit weight problems require attention to the policies and environments that guide individual behavior across a range of settings. Increasing household food protection and disposing of meals insecurity are distinct in the Healthy People 2020 targets as indispensable to dreams of advertising healthful diets and healthy weight .

• Responding to the growing childhood obesity epidemic, the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity developed and is working to put in force an interagency design to get rid of baby weight problems . The Task Force posted an action sketch with precise suggestions for addressing the childhood obesity epidemic, such as a name for in addition lookup and related policy to address food insecurity . During the first year of this initiative, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was enacted to enlarge children’s get right of entry to to healthful school ingredients . This act aims to increase the wide variety of eligible teenagers enrolled in college meal packages thru direct certification of children who acquire other federal help and improve get admission to to nutritious meals in faculties .

• The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has additionally convened an Obesity Research Task Force to advance a strategic plan to accelerate multidisciplinary research efforts to tackle the populace burden of weight problems and related persistent disease. The venture force identified and these days published a sequence of research challenges and possibilities to inform NIH research planning . Importantly, the NIH Strategic Plan for Obesity Research explicates the need to combine research outcomes into community programs and scientific practice . Historically, this want has not plainly taken into account food insecurity. However, given the congruency in populace health goals around persistent disease prevention and overlap in risk factors and mechanisms, it is apparent that efforts to promote meals security ought to be woven greater closely with weight problems prevention.

2) The Institute of Medicine (IOM) currently issued a policy quick that outlines a framework for bridging the proof hole in weight problems prevention via a four step process: Locate, Evaluate and Assemble proof to inform Decisions (LEAD). However, this framework does not offer insight into when an evidence base is suffi cient to instantaneous motion and does now not tackle other elements aside from evidence that selection makers may additionally want to take into account, which include the degree to which the policy may be construed as paternalistic and its have an impact on on equity. With multiple possible policy picks to select from, choice makers require a broader picture of the trade-offs of unique policy approaches.