Global, National, and Community Obesity Prevention Programs

Abstract

Although some high-income countries have managed to flatten the rate of increase in their (already high) obesity rates, no country in the world has been able to reverse the obesity epidemic. Obesity prevention is not an easy task because it requires multiple population-wide policy interventions targeted at global, national, and community settings. Public health strategies must be comprehensive and multisectoral and range from improving individual behavior to modifying the obesogenic environment, from promoting an individual responsibility to changing health policy, and from targeting adults to adopting a life-course approach. The latter approach has recently been recognized in global strategies as critical to curb the obesity prevention. It stresses the importance of early intervention during the life cycle to preventing obesity in the population. Interventions targeting the preconception period aim to assist parents-to-be in the best shape as possible, preferably resulting in women with a healthy prepregnancy BMI, lower gestational weight gain, and postpartum weight retention. Interventions in the postnatal phase aim to ensure the provision of sufficient and nutritious food to infants, children and adolescents to promote healthy growth. Comprehensive food policies are needed to create an enabling environment for infants and children so that they can acquire healthy food preferences and targeted actions to enable disadvantaged populations to overcome barriers to meeting healthy preferences. We argue that a focus on these so-called early life risk factors is essential in obesity prevention and could be the missing link in stopping the vicious cycle of obesity begetting obesity.