Building an evidence base to meet the needs of those tackling obesity prevention

Extract

Building an evidence base to meet the needs of public health practitioners faced with tackling the enormity of the obesity epidemic is a challenge of multi-faceted dimensions. Clearly, it requires us to tackle what have often been loose and disparate connections between policy agencies, research funders, public health professionals, physical activists, clinical dieticians and public health nutritionists, and the enthusiasm and creativity of non-government and community organizations. Arguments fly in impassioned debates regarding the place of drip fed, often non-evidence-based, highly ambitious small pots of funding; research funding-cycle attractive, behavioural interventions; commercially oriented, politically attractive health education, information and social marketing campaigns often aimed at laying the blame on individuals, particularly parents; and the grandfather of the lot—upstream, policy-oriented interventions affecting conditions of life such as employment and income. Understanding the differential impact of all these potential solutions on population obesity rates, in particular inequalities across the population, is a focus which is all too recent for the evidence base to be able to meet, up till now.