Contribution from Italy
Lesson Learned “Multistakeholder partnerships for improving the nutritional characteristics of food products".
Overweight and obesity are a public health problem whose solution cannot be entrusted exclusively to the health care system: the potential recipe for success in the reformulation of food products favoured by children requires cross-cutting, multi-sector interventions, with close cooperation between health authorities and the food industry.
We started from Vienna Declaration on Nutrition and Noncommunicable Diseases in the Context of Health 2020 n. 5 … (requires the widespread and active engagement of all relevant sectors and players and their engagement in whole-of-government, whole-of-society and health-in-all-policies approaches is crucial. Policy options for governments to consider include production, consumption, marketing, availability, access, economic measures and education-based interventions, taking into account the cultural dimensions of nutrition), the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Agenda 2030 (need to invent governmental and multi-stakeholder coalitions for implementation, and recognizes the necessity to the food manufacturing sector has launched a series of voluntary initiatives in which each producer has set goals and targets).
As part of a broader initiative to fight childhood overweight and obesity, we have identified several product categories (baked goods, cereals, and sweets; non-alcoholic drinks; and dairy products and ice cream) for which the food industry commits to reducing sugar, saturated fat, trans fatty acids, and salt, together with a constant effort to modify serving sizes and provide additional information on labels.
This is a multistakeholders approach (win-win strategy) that we have defined the “Shared objectives for improving the nutritional characteristics of food products, with a particular focus on children (3-12 years)”, in which the commitments made so far are important to achieve the goal of improving the nutritional characteristics of food products, but it is essential that the effort to study and design new formulations continue to be pursued, together with the dissemination of a culture that promotes healthy lifestyles from an early age.
Denise Giacomini