Creating healthy food environments through global benchmarking of government nutrition policies and food industry practices
Categorie(s):
Health
Author(s):
Stefanie Vandevijvere(1,2)* and Boyd Swinburn(1,3)
Keyword(s):
DOI:
Abstract :
Unhealthy processed food products are increasingly dominating over healthy foods, making food and nutrition
environments unhealthier. Development and implementation of strong government healthy food policies is
currently being circumvented in many countries by powerful food industry lobbying. In order to increase
accountability of both governments and the private sector for their actions, and improve the healthiness of food
environments, INFORMAS (the International Network for Food and Obesity/non-communicable diseases (NCDs)
Research, Monitoring and Action Support) has recently been founded to systematically and comprehensively
monitor food environments and policies in countries of varying size and income. This will enable INFORMAS to rank
both governments and private sector companies globally according to their actions on food environments.
Identification of those countries which have the healthiest food and nutrition policies and using them as
international benchmarks against which national progress towards best practice can be assessed, should support
reductions in global obesity and diet-related NCDs.