Abstract
Diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and obesity are the leading contributors to poor health worldwide. Efforts to improve population diets need to focus on creating healthy food environments. INFORMAS, established in 2012, is an international network that monitors and benchmarks food environments and related policies. By 2020, INFORMAS was active in 58 countries; national government policies were the most frequent aspect benchmarked. INFORMAS has resulted in the development and widespread application of standardized methods for assessing the characteristics of food environments. The activities of INFORMAS have contributed substantially to capacity building, advocacy, stakeholder engagement, and policy evaluation in relation to creating healthy food environments. Future efforts to benchmark food environments need to incorporate measurements related to environmental sustainability. For sustained impact, INFORMAS activities will need to be embedded within other existing monitoring initiatives. The most value will come from repeated assessments that help drive increased accountability for improving food environments.
Highlights
Drivers of Unhealthy Diets and ObesityUnhealthy diets and obesity are the leading contributors to poor health worldwide [3, 48]
The need for stronger and more comprehensive actions to improve the diets of populations and reduce their related inequalities has led to a focus on increasing the accountability of the major stakeholder groups, including through rigorous monitoring of the characteristics of food environments related to obesity and diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and through benchmarking of relevant policies and actions of governments and the food industry [67]
To evaluate the impact of INFORMAS activities over the period 2012–2020, we reviewed outputs generated by INFORMAS activities up to June 2020 and consulted with INFORMAS module www.annualreviews.org
Summary
Unhealthy diets and obesity are the leading contributors to poor health worldwide [3, 48]. Distribution, and marketing of ultra-processed foods [45] that are often high in salt, sugar, saturated fat, or energy, alongside strong economic forces driving consumption and growth, have been recognized globally as key drivers of unhealthy diets, obesity, and their associated inequalities [71]. Transitions to healthy food environments will need to be predominantly government led, including comprehensive regulations to restrict the marketing of unhealthy foods to children, improved health-related food labeling, and fiscal policies to better incentivize consumption of healthier foods and disincentivize consumption of unhealthy foods [68]. Despite strong evidence of the burden of diet-related disease and potential effective and cost-effective solutions, as well as consistent and urgent calls from health experts and public health organizations for multisectoral, multicomponent actions to improve diets [52, 87], government and societal efforts have generally fallen short of recommendations [24, 56]. Over the last decade, more countries have started implementing policies focused on specific aspects of food environments, with growing implementation of sugar-sweetened beverage taxes and front-of-pack labeling regulations [7, 29, 92]
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