Preventing Childhood Obesity - Evidence Policy and Practice.pdf

CHAPTER 24
The role of policy in preventing
childhood obesity
Mark Lawrence and Boyd Swinburn
WHO Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
Summary
• Policies are statements of intent about action and
they can shape the components of the food system
and/or physical activity environment to help prevent
obesity among children.
• The role of policy in preventing childhood obesity
includes:
outlining a vision and “road map ” for the coherent
planning, implementing and evaluating of
interventions;
communicating consistent messages about what
the government values and believes throughout
settings and/or organizations; and
institutionalizing commitments to practice and
thereby ensuring sustainability of systems, processes
and changes.
• The food system provides a framework for identifying
opportunities and challenges for policy
interventions that are systematic, coherent, comprehensive
and targeted at the appropriate level and
sector of government.
• Policy is political and evidence often is relegated to
being just one among many inputs into the policy -
making process, although there are recent moves to
make policy more evidence - based.
• Policy science aims to increase our understanding
of how and why policies are made to help improve
policy processes and outcomes.
Preventing Childhood Obesity. Edited by
E. Waters, B.A. Swinburn, J.C. Seidell and R. Uauy.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing.
Introduction
“ Policy ” is a nebulous term to describe an activity with
a very practical role. Among the many definitions of
policy, it is generally characterized as being a statement
that captures an organization ’ s values, beliefs
and intentions towards an issue. 1 Anyone might
develop a policy, though in this chapter we focus on
government policy and define obesity prevention
policy as:
a statement of intent about government action to
shape the components of the food system and/or
physical activity environment to help prevent
obesity in the population.
Policies can be broad and at a high level, such
as defining national strategic directions (so - called
“ big P ” policies), or more detailed and at a more
micro level, such as school rules about accepting
food company sponsorship for sporting equipment
( “ small p ” policies). In both instances, policies are
developed either in response to a problem or to proactively
set out a vision. There is a rapidly evolving
evidence base associated with the obesity epidemic in
relation to its prevalence, its determinants, its health,
social and economic implications and what interventions
are most/least effective in its prevention. Against
this evidence background there is an expectation
for government leadership in terms of policy action
to respond to the problem and to provide a vision of
how obesity might be managed and reduced into the
future.
In this chapter we analyse the role of policy in
preventing childhood obesity. We start this analysis
203