General strategies for obesity prevention

The prevention of obesity in infants and young children should be considered as high priority.

For infants and young children, the main preventive strategies are:

The promotion of exclusive breastfeeding;

avoiding the use of added sugars and starches when feeding formula; 

instructing mothers to accept their child’s ability to regulate energy intake rather than feeding until the plate is empty;

assuring the appropriate micronutrient intake needed to promote optimal linear growth.



For children and adolescents, prevention of obesity implies the need to:

Promote an active lifestyle;

limit television viewing;

promote the intake of fruits and vegetables;

restrict the intake of energy-dense, micronutrient-poor foods (e.g. packaged snacks);

restrict the intake of sugars-sweetened soft drinks.

Additional measures include modifying the environment to enhance physical activity in schools and communities, creating more opportunities for family interaction (e.g. eating family meals), limiting the exposure of young children to heavy marketing practices of energy-dense, micronutrient-poor foods, and providing the necessary information and skills to make healthy food choices.

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In Developing Countries

In developing countries, special attention should be given to avoidance of overfeeding stunted population groups.

Nutrition programmes designed to control or prevent undernutrition need to assess stature in combination with weight to prevent providing excess energy to children of low weight-for-age but normal weight-for-height.

In countries in economic transition, as populations become more sedentary and able to access energy-dense foods, there is a need to maintain the healthy components of traditional diets (e.g. high intake of vegetables, fruits and NSP). Education provided to mothers and low socioeconomic status communities that are food insecure should stress that overweight and obesity do not represent good health. Low-income groups globally and populations in countries in economic transition often replace traditional micronutrient-rich foods by heavily marketed, sugars-sweetened beverages (i.e. soft drinks) and energy-dense fatty, salty and sugary foods.

These trends, coupled with reduced physical activity, are associated with the rising prevalence of obesity.

Strategies are needed to improve the quality of diets by increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables, in addition to increasing physical activity, in order to stem the epidemic of obesity and associated disease

Eating behaviours

Eating behaviours that have been linked to overweight and obesity include snacking/eating frequency, binge-eating patterns, eating out, and (protectively) exclusive breastfeeding. Nutrient factors under investigation include fat, carbohydrate type (including refined carbohydrates such as sugar), the glycemic index of foods, and fibre.

Environmental issues are clearly important, especially as many environments become increasingly ‘‘obesogenic’’ (obesity-promoting).

Physical activity

Physical activity is an important determinant of body weight. In addition, physical activity and physical fitness (which relates to the ability to perform physical activity) are important modifiers of mortality and morbidity related to overweight and obesity. There is firm evidence that moderate to high fitness levels provide a substantially reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality and that these benefits apply to all BMI levels. Furthermore, high fitness protects against mortality at all BMI levels in men with diabetes. Low cardiovascular fitness is a serious and common comorbidity of obesity, and a sizeable proportion of deaths in overweight and obese populations are probably a result of low levels of cardio-respiratory fitness rather than obesity per se. Fitness is, in turn, influenced strongly by physical activity in addition to genetic factors. These relationships emphasise the role of physical activity in the prevention of overweight and obesity, independently of the effects of physical activity on body weight.