Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

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    • The question is posed in simple terms so the response must also be put simply - no. Or perhaps not yet. Of course there may be a few examples of individuals and groups that have worked to overcome their overweight and obesity, but in terms of population-level public health, no country has even begun to adequately address the key components of an obesity prevention strategy.

      Why? As the World Health Organization's Director-General has noted, sometimes in less than coded language, on many occasions, the political and economic influence of corporations whose profits depend on peddling junk food and sugar drinks stand in the way of pubic health.

      Even the most elementary gestures are rebuffed and blocked. Consider how in New York the then Mayor Bloomberg's effort just to restrict the gross excess of of two-pint 'Big Gulp' servings of sugary drinks was fought vehemently and defeated in court. At least Mexico was able to surprise the soft drink sector, dominated there by Coca Cola, with its sugar tax. But it is crass to look at short term outcomes almost month by month to try to prove or disprove that this is having a direct impact on obesity prevalence.

      No country has had a real opportunity to reshape the obesogenic environment that has stealthily driven the obesity epidemic over generations and no-one should expect to see magical transformations occuring overnight from a single and often limited intervention, for a problem that has built up among millions of us over decades.

      To some extent there are unrealistic expectations embedded in questions that demand evidence to show a policy that works. No single policy or programme works in isolation. Unless, as with tobacco control, countries can synchronise far reaching policy progrmmes to curb the excesses of industrial-scale junk food and sugar drinks saturating markets and cynically promoting over-consumption, while simultaneously engendering improvements in making healthier food both affordable and desirable, and unless we reverse the remorseless concentration of populations in ever denser urban settings where activity is limited and access to fresh food comes at a price few can afford, we can expect to see little benefit from small scale interventions alone.



      Special pleading from giant and hugely wealthy corporations that they need to be given 'incentives' rings hollow. The moral incentive to provide healthy products is not enough. They seek to hold the world to ransom demanding compensation in order for some transition from the existing 'toxic environment' to take place. The challenge of tackling obesity, therefore, becomes a much greater political and economic challenge of transforming a world where profit trumps health.

      Until we can muzzle corporate power and start to adapt the nutritional and physical environment to promote health, we seem destined to have to adapt ourselves to the disabling reality of more and more of us becoming overweight and obese with all the well known consequences, not merely in terms of increased costs of coping with comorbidities and related disabilities, but in ways not yet taken fully into account when assessing the 'externalities' - the cost of adapting the world to an obese society.