The WHO Department of Nutrition for Health and Development (NHD), through the work of the Nutrition Guidance Expert Advisory Group (NUGAG) Subgroup on Policy Actions, is providing evidence-informed WHO guidance on effective policy measures to support Member States in developing enabling food environment to promote healthy diets and nutrition. Priority policy measures include nutrition labelling policies, policies to restrict marketing to children, fiscal and pricing policies, school food and nutrition policies and trade and investment policies.
Providing such guidance contributes to efforts to achieve global goals and commitments to improve health and promote safe and healthy diets, including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Global Nutrition and NCD targets adopted by the 65th and 66th World Health Assemblies, respectively; the commitments made at the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) in 2014; and the goals of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025) declared by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in April 2016. The work contributes to achieving the commitments of the Political Declaration of the third high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases, which reaffirms the importance to “promote and implement policy, legislative and regulatory measures aiming at minimizing the impact of the main risk factors for non-communicable diseases, and promote healthy diets and lifestyles” (A/RES/73/2). The work of the NUGAG Subgroup on Policy Actions also supports achievement of the ‘triple billion’ goal set up by the 13th General Programme of Work (2019 – 2023), including one billion more people enjoying better health and well-being.
The first meeting of the NUGAG Subgroup on Policy Actions took place in December 2018, during which the NUGAG Subgroup reviewed and finalized the scope (including PICO questions and priority outcomes) of the systematic reviews which will guide the formulation of the recommendations for the guidelines on nutrition labelling policies, policies to restrict marketing to children, and fiscal and pricing policies.
The Nutrition Policy and Scientific Advice Unit (NPU) serves as the Secretariat of the NUGAG Subgroup on Policy Actions and will be convening the 2nd meeting of the NUGAG Subgroup on Policy Actions in Qingdao, China from 09 to 13 December 2019.
The objectives of the 2nd meeting are to:
- Review the final systematic reviews and draft the recommendations on nutrition labelling policies, policies to restrict marketing to children, fiscal and pricing policies to promote healthy diets, through:
- Assessing the certainty of evidence;
- Determining the strength of respective recommendations, taking into consideration detailed criteria, such as the balance of evidence on benefits and harms, values and preferences, resource implications, priority of the problems, equity and human rights, acceptability and feasibility;
- Reviewing and identifying implications for future research, taking into account on-going research and any existing controversies; and
- Reviewing any possible challenges for implementation of the guidelines.
- Review and finalize, following the processes established in the WHO Handbook for Guideline Development (2014):
- The scope of the guidelines on school food and nutrition policies;
- Questions to guide the systematic reviews on school food and nutrition policies using the “population, intervention, comparison and outcome” (PICO) format;
- Priority outcomes, including effects on health and other issues, related to implementing school food and nutrition policies.
The expected outcomes of the second meeting are, therefore, draft recommendations on nutrition labelling policies, policies to restrict marketing to children, fiscal and pricing policies to promote healthy diets; and final and agreed scope, PICO questions, priority outcomes to guide the undertaking of the systematic reviews and subsequently to formulate the recommendations for the guidelines on school food and nutrition policies.