Committee on World Food Security 46 - Event follow-up
Tackling obesity - Triple-win policies for healthy and sustainable food environments
Thursday 17th October 2019
Philippines Room, FAO/CFS, Rome
Our knowledge of obesogenic environments has leapt forwards in the last decade. We have a deeper understanding of the incentives to over-consume, the design of food environments, and the underlying systems that are creating the rising global health crisis. This was the focus of a joint side event at the 46th meeting of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS46), organised by World Obesity alongside UNICEF, Gehl and the Ministry of Health Brazil. The meeting, chaired by Anna Lartey, Director of Nutrition and Food Systems Division at FAO, focused on new and pioneering developments in policies and practices related to obesity and food systems. The session explored some examples of such developments, including urban food environments (foodscapes), government-level commitments to UN-level policies, and from the recent Lancet Commission on Obesity’s report on the Global Syndemic of obesity, under-nutrition and global warming. The event was attended by over 60 people and was an opportunity to raise awareness of the role of obesogenic environments in driving malnutrition in all its forms, and in turn the opportunities for addressing these within the context of CFS, a forum historically focused on hunger. The key question explored in the event was: what are the win-win solutions to mitigate the threats posed by food systems to human and planetary health?