Obesity
New Strategies to Prioritize Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity Interventions
Interventions for obesity have not often been based on considerations that could predict their effectiveness. However, advances in research provide several new approaches that can inform priorities for public health interventions directed at nutrition, physical activity, and obesity. These approaches include estimation of the effect size, comparison of the calorie gap with the caloric deficit induced by the intervention, population reach and impact, cost and cost effectiveness of the intervention, time required to evaluate the effect of the intervention on weight change, and feasibility of the intervention.Implications of the Energy Gap for the Prevention and Treatment of Childhood Obesity
The article by Wang and colleagues1 in this issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine provides important data that highlight the promise of prevention and raise the challenge of treatment in children and adolescents. The authors have calculated the caloric deficits necessary either to return the prevalence of child and adolescent obesity to 5% as it was in the 1970s, thereby achieving the Healthy People (HP) 2010 goal by 2020, or to reduce the current prevalence estimates by 10%, achieving the HP 2020 goal.
