The Solutions: Obesity Action Scotland’s Plans

From our event on childhood obesity, we know that:

• Price of healthy options is important, especially in a cost of living crisis. Conversely, increasing the price of unhealthy options through mechanisms such as the sugar tax both helps consumers to make different choices, and stimulates food manufacturers to reformulate products to stay competitive.
• Promotions of healthy or unhealthy foods influences decisions – such as temporary price reductions, buy-one-Get-one-Free or end-of aisle presentation.
• Advertising influences preferences - not least high fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) snacks to children when they are watching TV or going around the neighbourhood. Experience with an ad-free city in Bristol for HFSS products was met with the response that the city wasn’t going far enough.
• Labelling and frameworks or codes of practice help, but they need close monitoring so that less scrupulous retailers don’t take advantage of the good nature of others. Food Standards Scotland is on the case. Mandatory schemes that ensure level playing fields for businesses are much more successful than voluntary frameworks – and businesses back this up.

All of these interventions work, or could work. All of them together have more power and influence than any one singularly. They require producers, retailers, advocates, law-makers and regulators – and consumers – to work together.

Obesity Action Scotland’s plans for the coming year seek to change the food environment so that it is less toxic to consumers, doing whatever we can to influence decision-takers. It draws on interventions that work. Our key priorities are:

1. Focus on achievement of the national aim to halve childhood obesity by 2030 and to significantly reduce diet-related health inequalities
2. Focus on improving the food environment through action on availability, affordability and acceptability of unhealthy and healthy food and drink;

• at national level through legislation and population wide measures
• at local level through local food plans and other levers

3. Help reduce stigma associated with overweight and obesity
4. Enable the work of the Scottish Obesity Alliance and build the will for action and positive change
5. Create a legacy of action and lessons from the lead areas delivering Whole System Approaches around Scotland.

These priorities strengthen action where OAS believes it can make most impact this year, building on opportunities at UK, Scotland and local levels, supporting communities and relationships that make change easier, and which remove weight stigma.

What doesn’t work, is short of evidence, or doesn’t provide a sustained effect? Information and education, on their own, don’t work. Individual behaviour change – such as going on a diet, with and without help - works for around 10% of people, and the effect is unlikely to last if nothing else changes – that is, the triggers for putting on weight are the same as they were before.

What needs to change is the environment in which people live, what influences decisions about food and drink purchase and consumption, and offers better prospects that we live in a world that makes   healthy weight the easier or inevitable state for our people in Scotland. That is a long way from happening, but elements that would create that future are set out above, in the event summary and Obesity Action Scotland’s plans.

Blog written by Dr Andrew Fraser, Steering Group Chair for Obesity Action Scotland.