47 Results

In December last year Professor Fran Baum wrote New SA report shows why governments are failing to control health spending for this blog in response to the McCann Review of Non-Hospital Based Services. In that article Professor Baum lamented the lack of understanding of community services and primary health care that leads to questionable funding decisions. [...]

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 [...]

Penny Wilson, PhD Researcher at the Australian National University writes: A couple of weeks back I awoke with a swollen and painful knee. I’ve had problem knees since high school and figured that this was just another chapter in the saga. Some days later I was fed up – my knee was preventing me from [...]

Phillip Baker, Alessandro Demaio and Rob Moodie write: What causes two out of every three deaths in the world, has been described by the Director-General of the World Health Organisation as “a slow motion disaster” and by the Secretary-General of the UN a “global epidemic”? The answer is non-communicable diseases (NCDs): cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers and lung diseases. One [...]

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 [...]

Is a tax on junk food the answer to Australia’s obesity crisis or would it simply compound the current inequities in access to nutritious food? Suzie Ferrie explores these issues in the following piece which first appeared in The Conversation and is reprinted with permission.   We often hear calls for a junk food tax [...]

Dr Rosemary Stanton, nutritionist, and Jane Martin, Executive Manager of the Obesity Policy Coalition, give us the skinny on health claims made by the food industry…. ‘Reduces your cholesterol absorption!’ ‘With probiotics to improve digestion!’ ‘Good for heart health!’ While health claims like these scream from the supermarket shelves, consumers may be surprised to learn [...]

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 [...]