“The blueprint for initiatives to improve health by focusing on the food we eat has already been laid out by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its 2004 Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health. The WHO identified policy initiatives that should be undertaken by national authorities to help reduce the incidence of obesity and diet-related disease; they include efforts to reduce the salt, trans-fat, and sugar content of processed foods, improve food labeling, and set guidelines for foods that should or should not be advertised to children. Other countries have taken the lead in protecting the health of their citizens and provide examples of how we can follow suit:

* In Japan, health officials check the waistlines of citizens over 40, and those considered too fat undergo diet counseling. Failure to slim down can lead to fines.
* New Zealand has rules barring people it deems too fat from immigrating to the country.
* Germany plans to spend $47 million on healthy eating and sports programs and to set tougher nutritional standards for school lunches.
* Denmark limits the amount of artery-clogging trans-fatty acids in restaurant foods.
* In an effort to prevent overweight in schoolchildren, a community approach that started in two towns in France has now expanded to 200 towns in Europe under the name “Together let’s prevent obesity in children.” The program encourages children to eat better and exercise more by taking such measures as building sporting facilities and playgrounds, and offering cooking workshops.
* And of course, there are the Mediterranean countries where they are practicing a healthier way of eating, by enjoying traditional diets that feature whole unprocessed foods from nature. The Mediterranean diet, lauded for its contribution to health, features fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, olive oil, and red wine.
* No other countries in the world allow the advertising of prescription drugs to the public except the United States and New Zealand.

Great Britain, in particular, has made great progress towards improving the food supply and educating its citizens:

* In Great Britain, residents in some cities are being recruited to wear electronic tracking tags to calculate how much they move each day and how many calories they burn off. Daily exercisers can be rewarded with coupons and even days off from work. Britain’s National Health Service is paying for at least 30,000 people to take weight-loss classes.
* Efforts are being made by the UK’s Food Standards Authority (FSA) to persuade companies to reformulate processed foods, use standardized front-of-pack symbols to communicate nutritional values, and set nutritional guidelines for limiting food advertising to children.
* The FSA has successfully conducted a sodium reduction program in the UK and is presently conducting a similar effort to reduce saturated fat in processed food products.
* FSA has developed a set of nutrition criteria and established a system of “traffic lights” that can be used on the fronts of food packages to communicate nutritional value. The red, amber, and green dots indicate whether a food contains high, moderate or low levels of fat, saturated fat, salt, and sugars.
* The UK traffic light system is voluntary, but may be made mandatory in the future – despite food manufacturers’ objections.
* The UK has prohibited the broadcast advertising of low-nutrition foods on television and radio programs that appeal to children under the age of 16. American food companies like Kellogg, Coca-cola, and McDonalds must comply with this new UK law (yet they continue to expose American children to advertisements now banned in England).

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