Curbing the childhood obesity epidemic

Open Access
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Childhood obesity has become a major threat to our children's health. Being a Journal with the ambition to cover childhood health issues, we carried forward the question how this obesity epidemic can be curbed to a group of practitioners and researchers in Europe. In one of the contributions Knai and co-workers from England emphasise how children are particularly responsive to sophisticated marketing of food and draws interesting parallels with what lessons have been learnt from tackling the tobacco companies. Braet and Winckel from Belgium and Marcus from Sweden stress how important the engagement from parents, children, and schools are for a successful intervention and how often the measures taken to handle the situation are toothless. There is a certain air of pessimism over what can be done to curb this ongoing obesity epidemic. It could therefore be fruitful to bear in mind that many earlier preventive efforts directed towards children and their surroundings have been successful, so why should we not be able to reverse this trend? As so many times before, we have to equip ourselves with a long-term perspective, most probably of a couple of decades.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: