Inequalities in childhood overweight and obesity: A call to strengthen upstream policy measures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prevalence of overweight and obesity among children and adolescents across Europe is an ongoing public health crisis with both short and long-term consequences affecting health, wellbeing and society. Yet, efforts to address this crisis have mainly focused on individual behaviour change rather than addressing the social, structural and commercial determinants of obesity, leading to limited success and growing inequalities. In this commentary we advocate for system-level action. By presenting the most recent data on childhood and adolescent obesity prevalence in the WHO European region, we highlight persistent inequalities, both within and between countries, with a focus on gender, geography and socioeconomic factors. Comprehensive, evidence-based upstream policies can address these disparities, and we advocate for structural, fiscal and regulatory action; investment in accessible parks and recreational facilities; support for a health promotion schools approach and meaningful engagement with children and adolescent to develop programmes, policies and environments that support their health. Despite the recognition of this public health crisis and the evidence supporting effective policies, the implementation of obesity policies across Europe is limited. Key challenges include reliance on voluntary measures, resistance from commercial enterprises and the prioritization of economic growth over public health. Currently, a WHO/UNICEF Child and Adolescent Health and Wellbeing Regional Strategy for Europe and Central Asia is under development, with obesity as a priority area providing a pivotal opportunity to harness interest and momentum to effect change as outlined in this article. Obesity policy implementation must also be accompanied by ongoing monitoring of inequalities in obesity in Europe.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".