Just how effective are healthy eating policies? Many campaigns by EU governments to encourage people to eat more healthily have been carried out in the past decades with varying degrees of success or failure. Now, a new EUR 2.5 million EU-funded project led by the UK's University of Reading is cataloguing these campaigns to... Many campaigns by EU governments to encourage people to eat more healthily have been carried out in the past decades with varying degrees of success or failure. Now, a new EUR 2.5 million EU-funded project led by the UK's University of Reading is cataloguing these campaigns to see which were successful and which were not and for what reasons. The three-and-a-half-year, nine-partner EATWELL project ('Interventions to promote healthy eating habits: evaluation and recommendations'), funded under the 'Food, agriculture and fisheries, and biotechnology' Theme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), will also look at how the public sector can market healthy eating to the general public and what attitude barriers it may face in different countries. Dr Bhavani Shankar from the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at the University of Reading said, 'It is easy to be dismissive of state interference in determining dietary choice. Indeed, the nanny state specifying what one should eat can conjure up Orwellian visions. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is a clear rationale for further government involvement in food choice. 'Obesity, driven partly by food choice, now accounts for between 5% and 7% of total healthcare costs in the EU. In addition to its contribution via obesity, poor dietary quality directly contributes to a range of preventable diseases that raise health care costs.' Obesity costs the EU around EUR 70 billion each year in health care services and lost productivity time. In the UK, which is notorious for having one of the unhealthiest diets in western Europe, the cost of living on a high sugar, high fat and high salt diet is causing a tide of obesity in both adults and children and contributing to a variety of other dietary related conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Altogether, around 70,000 UK citizens die prematurely each year due to dietary related disease. 'In the case of the UK, people making poor dietary choices makes the NHS [National Health Service] more expensive for everybody,' commented Bruce Traill, Professor of Food Economics at the University of Reading. 'So, quite apart from trying to save lives by encouraging healthier eating, some government intervention in this area is in the social interest. Our research will examine the range of policy interventions that have been carried out in EU countries and elsewhere in the past. We are particularly interested to examine how the private sector's marketing expertise could be effectively adopted by public sector healthy eating campaigns.' Previous EU government policies on diet have included bans on the advertising of junk food on children's TV, the promotion of fruit and vegetable consumption, the creation of food labelling schemes and improvements in school and public sector canteens to encourage children and adults to make healthy food choices. EATWELL will gather data on previous healthy eating initiatives, how consumers reacted to them, and how, and if, the initiatives made an impact on obesity and health levels. The conclusions will be presented to EU Member States and the European Commission. Countries United Kingdom
