23 Results

When the junk food and alcohol industries seek to cosy up to health professionals and organisations, beware. The aim of such “partnerships” is to stop the sort of regulation that is needed to improve public health and safety, according to the latest JournalWatch article profiled by Dr Melissa Stoneham of the Public Health Advocacy Institute [...]

(This post was updated on 22 Feb with a response from Professor Amanda Lee, chair of the Dietary Guidelines Working Committee). As previously reported at Croakey, the long-awaited Australian Dietary Guidelines have now been released. The document is structured around five broad guidelines: To achieve and maintain a healthy weight, be physically active and choose amounts of [...]

Gary Sacks, Research Fellow, Population Health at Deakin University, writes: Denmark has scrapped the world’s first “fat tax”, which was charged on foods high in saturated fats, after just one year. Plans to introduce a tax on sugar have also been abandoned. In making the announcement, the Danish government said the tax had been criticised [...]

In a recent Croakey post, I took a minor swipe at the Australian National Preventive Health Agency for its apparent lack of digital engagement. The Agency has since been in touch to outline a number of its social media initiatives – as described in the article towards the bottom of this post. I responded that [...]

Charis Palmer writes: Australia should consider a healthy food rebate, tax on sugary drinks, and regulated portion sizes argue health experts, as New York pushes ahead with government regulation to address the obesity epidemic. The New York City health commissioner behind a proposed cap on the container size of sugary soft drinks has argued government [...]

When it comes to food and health, it seems that we are living in parallel universes. In one universe, there is a new report from The Institute of Medicine in the US, Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation, urging governments and decision makers (including those in the private sector) “to [...]

Food policy is such an important – and contested – space that we should have a Food Minister, in Cabinet, according to Michael Moore, CEO of the Public Health Association of Australia, and Associate Professor Heather Yeatman of the School of Health Sciences at the University of Wollongong. *** Making the case for a Ministry for Food Michael [...]

As previously mentioned, Croakey readers are welcome to sign up for (rather irregular) summaries of posts. If you’d like to join the mailing list, please send your email or leave it below. Here is the latest compilation, covering from 6 October – December 23, 2011. The latest readership figures are now also available, showing that [...]

As you may have heard, drafts of the revised Australian Dietary Guidelines and the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating are now available for public comment, with a view to their finalised release next year. Clearly, translating more than 55,000 scientific journal articles into clear, simple messages and advice is no small task. In a nutshell, [...]