COPENHAGEN—On Sept. 19-20, the United Nations will hold a High Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) in New York to develop strategies on how to better prevent, diagnose and treat cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes.
The meeting also will address four specific risk factors, including unhealthy diets, tobacco use, harmful use of alcohol and physical inactivity.
The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe and the Directorate noted an unhealthy diet is one of the major risk factors for a range of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes and other conditions linked to obesity. The agency has made specific recommendations for a healthy diet, including eating more fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts and grains; and cutting down on salt, sugar and fats. It also suggests choosing unsaturated fats, instead of saturated fats and eliminating trans fatty acids.
To bring attention to the obesity epidemic, WHO’s Regional Office for Europe and the Directorate-General for Health and Consumers of the European Commission in 2008 established a joint 3-year project to monitor progress in improving nutrition and physical activity and preventing obesity in the European Union. The outcome was the development of a “Good Practice Appraisal Tool" to assess good practice elements of design, monitoring, evaluation and implementation of preventive programs, projects, initiatives and interventions to counteract obesity and improve nutrition and physical activity.
Using a set of predefined criteria, the tool aims to identify programs that can be considered good practice and can serve as an example for future initiatives that aim to improve nutrition and physical activity or prevent obesity. The tool can be used to monitor and document the aspects of the programs that are known to contribute to the effectiveness of an intervention and to identify points for improvement. The tool generates a good practice score for three different program components (planning, monitoring and evaluation, and implementation) as well as for the intervention as a whole.
