The introduction of a “sugar tax” on sweetened beverages and restrictions on marketing unhealthy food to children are just two measures planned by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its renewed quest to reduce obesity throughout Europe.
In efforts to control the expanding issue, policy and societal interventions would be more effective than merely increasing the responsibility of individuals to achieve healthy eating and weight-reducing goals on their own, experts said.
In 2015, the WHO had established a goal to halt the escalation in obesity rates as part of its effort to contain the death toll of non-communicable diseases by 2025.
According to the WHO Regional Obesity Report 2022, not one of the 53 nations in the European region is currently on track to meet that goal. Now the organisation has released a plan to accelerate progress in reducing obesity, which puts less of the burden on the individual to maintain healthy eating habits.
It said policy interventions “that target environmental and commercial determinants of poor diet at the entire population level” would help “reverse the obesity epidemic, address dietary inequalities, and achieve environmentally sustainable food systems”.
Dr Joshua Petimar, research scientist within the Department of Population Medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston, told Medical News Today, “Improving nutrition and health requires us to shift our focus from ‘personal responsibility’ toward broader society-wide solutions.
“Eating behaviours are negatively influenced by many macroscopic factors, like predatory industry practices, poor food access, unaffordability of healthy foods, and others. Proposed solutions fixated on individual responsibility without targeting societal factors are not addressing the primary threats to populations’ nutrition and health.”
The report says barriers to implementing effective obesity policies include “the continuing narrative that addressing obesity is the responsibility of the individual, and not the responsibility of wider society, including governments”.
The WHO’s regional director for Europe, Dr Hans Henri Kluge, said: “Obesity knows no borders. In the Europe and Central Asia, no single country is going to meet the WHO Global NCD target of halting the rise of obesity.”
The report finds that 59% of adults in Europe are overweight or living with obesity. Among children, 29% of boys and 27% of girls qualify as having obesity.
The WHO estimates that overweight and obesity are responsible for more than 13% of deaths – 1.2m – in the region annually. They are also believed to be the leading behavioural factors behind disability, causing 7% of cases.
Obesity has been linked to cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and chronic respiratory diseases, and has also been linked to 13 cancers, the WHO saying it is “directly responsible” for at least 200,000 new cancer cases each year.
For nations funding national healthcare, obesity is also expensive, directly consuming as much as 8% of overall health costs in EU countries in 2014. The WHO also cites research that found it costs 30% more to treat people with obesity than people without.
Proposals for Europe
The WHO proposes a comprehensive approach to creating a culture of healthy eating through various policies, including, among other things, implementing fiscal interventions (taxation on sugar-sweetened beverages or subsidies for healthy foods); restrictions on the marketing of unhealthy foods to children; improvement of access to obesity and overweight management services in primary health care, as well as efforts to improve diet and physical activity across the life course, school-based interventions, and those that would create environments improving accessibility to and affordability of healthy foods and opportunities for physical activity.
WHO OBESITY REPORT 2022
Medical News Today article – Obesity: New WHO report shifts focus from the individual to societal causes (Open access)
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