Journal of Obesity & Weight Loss Therapy
Open Access

Commentary

Getting Fat: “What” is Eaten is as Important as “How much” is Eaten

Department of Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Tulane University, New Orleans, USA

*Corresponding Author:

Roger Shrimpton
Department of Global Community Health and Behavioural Sciences
Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
1440 Canal Street, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA
Tel: +1 504-988-5388
E-mail: rshrimpt@tulane.edu

Received date: July 05, 2017; Accepted date: July 12, 2017; Published date: July 19, 2017

Citation: Shrimpton R, Bazzano A and Mason J (2017) Getting Fat: “What” is Eaten is as Important as “How much” is Eaten. J Obes Weight Loss Ther 7:344. doi:10.4172/2165-7904.1000344

Copyright: © 2017 Shrimpton R, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Obesity is becoming an enormous global problem and urgent measures are needed to contain it. Traditional thinking that it is just a problem of energy balance has led to educational approaches to get people to eat less and exercise more becoming the standard interventions. However, new evidence suggests that it is not just how much you eat, but what is being eaten that is driving the problem. Evidence for the various causalities, especially sugar intake, and the sort of approaches needed to stop the problem getting worse are presented. Policy actions to promote healthy diets cannot just focus on information based approaches that will help the public make better informed choices (e.g. media campaigns, dietary guidelines). In addition, more structural approaches are needed such as fiscal measures, and restrictions on advertising. Policy assessments should be carefully designed based on a theory of change, using indicators of progress along the various pathways towards the long-term goal of reducing obesity rates. The most important research needed is to strengthen the monitoring and evaluation of such programme approaches using a plausibility approach. No country has demonstrated success in controlling obesity yet.