No abstract
OBJECTIVE: To assess the views of professionals working in the obesity ®eld on the potential usefulness and feasibility of implementing different types of public health prevention strategies. METHOD: A questionnaire listing 20 public health strategies was mailed to pre-registrants of an international obesity prevention symposium. Respondents were asked to rate how useful and how feasible they felt each of the listed actions would be for the prevention of obesity in their home countries. The list included education-based strategies aimed at changing individual behaviour as well as more radical measures aimed at reducing population exposure to obesity-promoting factors in the environment. RESULTS: A 32% response was obtained. Education-based strategies were seen to be both useful and feasible. Less con®dence was expressed in strategies aimed at changing the environment. CONCLUSION: People working in the obesity ®eld tend to feel most comfortable with education-based prevention strategies. Implementation of environment-based strategies needed to encourage and support behaviour change may require the involvement of people from relevant sectors outside the obesity ®eld.Keywords: obesity prevention; public health; strategy; environment; opinion; education Con®dence in public health approaches to obesity prevention Although there is little information available on rigorous evaluation of preventive strategies, it is generally agreed that past attempts to deal with overweight and obesity at the public health level have had little impact on population body weight.1 This is thought to be due in part to over-reliance on educational strategies without attending to the environmental changes needed to encourage and support behaviour change. Recently, greater recognition has been afforded in the scienti®c literature and expert reports to the need to pursue strategies which address structural factors that are the major societal contributors to over-consumption of food and inadequate physical activity. ± 3Almost nothing is known, however, about the views of people working in the obesity ®eld regarding such strategies.In this report, we examine the con®dence of participants at the international Berzelius Symposium on the Prevention of Obesity (Stockholm, 26 ± 28 August 1998) in the potential usefulness and feasibility of implementing selected public health strategies in their home countries. Prior to the symposium, a survey was mailed to 77 pre-registered individuals from 18 countries. The survey listed 20 potential public health actions drawn from the literature. These included environment-based strategies that address major societal factors hypothesized to contribute to over-consumption of calories and inadequate physical activity, such as transportation patterns, food marketing practices and lack of opportunities for physical activity at work and in the community.Respondents were asked to indicate on a ®ve-point Likert rating scale how useful and, in a separate question, how feasible they thought each of the listed actions woul...
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