Europe scores poorly on healthy food environment policies

In eleven European countries, governments should make a larger effort to support people to eat healthy by creating healthy food environments. This can be read in an The Lancet Regional Health – Europe publication.

"This study shows that urgent action is needed within Europe to create healthy food environments, although it also makes clear that some countries perform better than others. If we really want to prevent overweight and diet-related chronic diseases, collective primary prevention strategies are a necessity. Such structural measures provide larger health benefits at population level”, says Dr Maartje Poelman of Wageningen University & Research.

Low level of policy implementation in the Netherlands

Apart from Finland, Norway, and Portugal, all countries have predominantly ‘low’ to ‘very low’ implementation scores for policies which directly shape food environments. The Netherlands, Spain, and Germany are at the bottom of the list. Experts in the eleven countries recommend immediate action in Europe. Across the eleven participating countries, a total of 212 actions are proposed to create healthy food environments.

Main outcomes

In most countries the top recommended actions for national governments include:

• the implementation of price increases on unhealthy foods and beverages.
• the implementation of nutrition standards in schools, including the provision of healthy school meals and foods.
• to increase the national budget for primary prevention and health protection strategies.

In half of the countries the top recommended actions for national governments are:

• a ban on marketing of foods for children that fall outside the healthy dietary guidelines.
• to demonstrate leadership and commitment to obesity prevention, for example to develop of a government wide, national prevention agreement and implementation plan.

About the study on effective policies to prevent diet-related diseases

This study is the first to conduct a pooled analysis to assess the overall picture of policies in eleven European countries using the Food Environment Policy Index (Food-EPI). It visualises the different levels of implementation of food environment policies within and between different European countries and identified what actions national governments in each country should take. The Food-EPI consists of seven policy domains that represent key aspects of food environments are highlighted: food composition, food labelling, food promotion, food prices, food provision and food retail and 24 indicators referencing policy support domains, divided into the categories of leadership, governance, monitoring, funding, platforms for interaction, and health-in-all policies.

Read the publication: ‘Policy Implementation and priorities to create healthy food environments using the Healthy Food Environment Policy Index (Food-EPI): A pooled level analysis across eleven European Countries’

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