International health group to measure government food policies in obesity fight

An international group of nutrition researchers announced Friday it will start measuring the failure of government policies to reverse the global obesity epidemic. The new group of nine university groups and five global non- government organisations, called INFORMAS, plans to monitor food environments all around the world. "No country has reversed the obesity epidemic, in part because widely-recommended healthy food policies have not been fully implemented," said Boyd Swinburn, professor of Population Nutrition and Global Health at the University of Auckland, which hosts the INFORMAS secretariat. "Researchers have documented the increasing obesity problem for several decades and it is long overdue to start documenting how well the agreed solutions are being applied and what effect policies are having on the food landscape," he said in a statement. Experts agreed that the main driver of high obesity rates was the widespread availability of cheap, tasty, unhealthy food that was heavily marketed, he said. "The surprising thing is that very few countries are able to describe what the food landscape looks like in their country," said Swinburn. "We currently can't answer basic questions like 'What foods are for sale in which areas?', 'What is the nutrition content of those foods?', 'Which foods are advertised the most?', and 'How does the price of unhealthy foods compare to the price of healthy foods?'." The INFORMAS researchers would also identify countries with the healthiest food policies and use them as international benchmarks against which to assess national progress towards best practice. All countries have signed up to a World Health Organization target of reducing premature death from non-communicable diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, by 25 percent by the year 2025. "The target is to achieve no further increase in obesity rates, and this will be one of the most challenging targets to reach since countries are almost all heading in the wrong direction," said Swinburn.