This report by Nesta, authored by the UK government’s former food policy advisor Henry Dimbleby and public health expert Dr Dolly van Tulleken, draws on interviews with former prime ministers, health secretaries and other senior ministers to offer practical advice and insights on how today’s politicians can tackle to UK’s obesity crisis.

In this book, Stanley Ulijaszek attempts to pull apart the entangled fields and viewpoints concerned with obesity to weave together a cohesive understanding of the issue plaguing many countries around the world. The author takes an interdisciplinary approach to elucidate facts in the midst of decades of failed policy and interventions. 

This report reflects on trends in hunger and malnutrition in South Asia, highlighting the growing issue of obesity coexisting with rising levels of hunger and malnutrition. It proposes new policy actions targeting the entire food value chain in order to address the challenges which have destabilised South Asian food systems over the past five years. 

This paper explores how the food industry was able to influence and weaken the 2018 Dutch prevention agreement on overweight, using documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests. It argues that so-called voluntary agreements - a form of governance developed through negotiation between public and private stakeholders - is too susceptible to industry influence, and that stronger public regulation is a better alternative.

This paper, based on Australian dietary survey data, provides support for the “protein leverage hypothesis” - the theory that people’s appetites regulate their protein intake to be within a narrow range, and hence that if protein makes up a lower proportion of the foods they eat, people will end up consuming more calories (in the form of fats and carbohydrates) as a side effect of their appetite for protein. Hence, it argues, protein is key to understanding the high prevalence of obesity. It identifies highly processed foods as one of the food categories that has the strongest “diluting” effect on dietary protein.

This paper reviews studies on the interactions between weight loss and food environments in several high-income countries. It finds that unsupportive food environments can undermine people’s efforts to lose weight or maintain weight loss in many ways, especially for people on a low income.

The 2021 edition of the Global Nutrition Report examines progress towards global nutrition targets, the impact of diets on health and the environment, the nutrition financing landscape, and reporting on Nutrition for Growth commitments. 

This article outlines two different models for understanding the obesity pandemic: the first and most commonly accepted being the energy balance model, which argues that obesity is driven by high energy consumption, and the second, favoured by the authors, being the carbohydrate-insulin model, which suggests that obesity is instead driven by consumption of rapidly digestible carbohydrates.

This paper reviews the effectiveness of government obesity policies in England for the period 1992 to 2020. It finds that these policies have tended to rely on the behaviour changes of individuals and avoid more interventionist approaches, that governments do not regularly assess the effectiveness of past obesity strategies, and that obesity has not become less prevalent despite 14 different obesity strategies being published over the period of study.