The INFORMAS healthy food environment policy index in Brazil: Benchmarking, current policies, and determining priorities for the future.

Introduction: Obesity and non-communicable diseases are the most important cause of death and inability in Brazil and worldwide. Public policies are an important strategy to prevent obesity. This study analysed the scope of Brazilian public policies for preventing and controlling obesity using the INFORMAS/Food-EPI protocol.

An Analysis of Key Actor Networks for Scale-Up Strategies for Childhood Obesity Prevention and the Care of Children with Obesity in Brazil.

Background: Effective scale-up of multisectoral strategies aimed to prevent and treat childhood obesity has been a challenge in Brazil, the largest country in Latin America. Implementation Science methods, such as Net-Map, can identify key actors and opinion leaders (OLs) to advance the implementation and promote sustainability.

Objectives: This study aimed to analyze power relations between key actors and OLs who influence the scale-up of Brazilian strategies for childhood obesity at the federal and state/municipal (local) levels.

The regulation of ultra-processed food products: the challenge of ruling the market.

The relationship between the consumption of ultra-processed food products and the increase in obesity and the risk of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) has prompted international organizations to mobilize governments to regulate the reduction of the levels of sugars, fats and sodium in such products. The article analyzes the understanding of different strategic subjects about the health risks associated with the ultra-processed food products, and the public intervention adopted to modify their composition, in compliance with the Brazilian National Food and Nutrition Policy (PNAN). This is a qualitative empirical investigation, in which representatives of 12 institutions were interviewed.

Reflections on ideas and disputes in the context of the promotion of healthy eating.

Actions in the promotion of healthy eating are strategic for reversing nutritional problems. This article analyzes the disputes over ideas in discursive repertoires on healthy eating in Brazil's national policies and international, government, civil society, and private commercial sector documents in the last 20 years. Based on the document analysis method in dialogue with the academic literature, the following perspectives on healthy eating were identified: traditional culturalist; medicalizing biological/nutritional; multidimensional; and systemic.

Public infrastructure for food and nutrition security in brazil: fufilling the constitutional commitment to the human right to adequate food.

Unlabelled: Food insecurity is a critical global problem with social and public health consequences. In Brazil, access to adequate food is a fundamental human right guaranteed under the country's Constitution since 2010. As such, the State assumes the distinct and complementary obligations to respect, protect, promote and provide the Right to Adequate Food.

UN Food System Summit Fails to Address Real Healthy and Sustainable Diets Challenges.

Evidence of the impacts of corporate food systems on people's health raised concerns about the multiple outcomes of malnutrition and climate change, including commodities production and high consumption of ultra-processed food products. The COVID-19 pandemic overwhelms this scenario, highlighting the urgency for improvements in governance spaces and regulatory measures that can tackle the advance of large corporations, which act exclusively based on their private interests.

The Indispensable Territorial Dimension of Food Supply: A View from Brazil During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The research-activists network 'Collective Action on Real Food' analyzed alternative food supply initiatives formed in response and/or expanded due to the pandemic in Brazil and identified more than 260 examples. Despite this dynamism, the policy processes of the UN Food System Summit were not able to-or might not even have tried to-break the mechanisms that make such initiatives politically invisible.

Better nutrition, better lives: Countries' positioning to fight all forms of malnutrition.

Objective: To identify how countries have positioned themselves to fight against all forms of malnutrition.

Methods: Qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive study of the statements of 91 out of the 127 (71.7%) countries that issued declarations in the Second International Conference on Nutrition.

Objectives and Competencies in Food and Nutrition Education in the Brazilian Undergraduate Nutrition Program.

Objective: To identify the objectives and competencies sought by the discipline of food and nutrition education (FNE) in the training of nutritionists.

Design: A qualitative study, based on the Theory of Social Representations.

Setting: A total of 381 Brazilian public and private higher education institutions with undergraduate courses in nutrition were invited to complete an online questionnaire.

History and challenges of Brazilian social movements for the achievement of the right to adequate food.

The historical struggles that Brazil faced to overcome malnutrition coincided with the empowerment of civil society and social movements which played a crucial role in the affirmation of health and food as social rights. After two decades under military dictatorship, Brazil went through a redemocratization process in the 1980s when activism emerged to demand spaces to participate in policy-making regarding the social agenda, including food and nutrition security (FNS). From 1988 onward institutional structures were established: the National Council of FNS (CONSEA) convenes government and civil society sectors to develop and monitor the implementation of policies, systems and actions.

Food risk regulation: the tensions of the Brazilian Health Surveillance System.

This article addresses the dynamics of Brazilian food control practices, highlighting their special risk-related features and the types of intervention, as well as the recently adopted instruments to control risks related to the nutritional composition of food and their institutional repercussions. Food regulation in Brazil dates back to the First Republic. The practice has been remodeled over the years, due to both the increasing complexity of the risks and the introduction of new institutional operational mechanisms.

Nutrition capacity development: a practice framework.

Objective: To outline a framework and a process for assessing the needs for capacity development to achieve nutrition objectives, particularly those targeting maternal and child undernutrition.

Design: Commentary and conceptual framework.

Setting: Low- and middle-income countries.

[National policies and the field of Food and Nutrition in Collective Health: the current scenario].

It is presented a review of the guidelines implementation of the National Food and Nutrition Policy (PNAN) contextualizing the actions in the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) scenario. At ten years of its publication, PNAN faces challenges both to expand and qualify the shares of food and nutrition on health. It is challenging to stand as interlocutor and legitimate representative of the area of health, political and institutional context of food security and nutrition.

Television food advertising to children: a global perspective.

Objectives: We compared television food advertising to children in several countries.

Methods: We undertook a collaboration among 13 research groups in Australia, Asia, Western Europe, and North and South America. Each group recorded programming for 2 weekdays and 2 weekend days between 6:00 and 22:00, for the 3 channels most watched by children, between October 2007 and March 2008.

[Promotion of healthy eating habits by schools: a methodological proposal for training courses for educators and school cafeteria owners].

The project entitled Promotion of Health Eating Habits by Schools, operating in the Federal District of Brazil since 2001, encourages good eating habits in the school community within the context of promoting healthy lifestyles and preventing chronic non-communicable diseases. The current article presents and analyzes a methodology to train preschool and elementary educators and school cafeteria owners. The workshops included theoretical classes, practical activities, and educational games and were evaluated on the basis of expansion and applicability of knowledge, in addition to implementation of the 10 steps to a healthy school cafeteria.

[International experiences with health claims in food labeling].

With ever-increasing frequency, consumers are seeking information on the foods they eat. Food labels are an important source of this type of information, and the Codex Alimentarius, created by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, provides a global reference for coordinated food quality and identification standards. The Codex Alimentarius agenda includes nutritional information and "health claims," which are defined as any representation that states, suggests, or implies that a relationship exists between a food or a constituent of that food and health.

[Usage of food and beverage labels by supermarket shoppers in Brasilia, Brazil].

Objective: To investigate whether adults who shop in supermarkets in one part of Brasilia, the capital city of Brazil, use the information contained in food and beverage labels, as well as to characterize this usage.

Methods: This study was done in five supermarkets in the Plano Piloto (Pilot Plan) central core area of Brasilia. The research was carried out in two stages: (1) a quantitative stage, based on a cross-sectional study, during which 250 individuals were randomly selected and surveyed in the supermarkets; and (2) a qualitative stage, in which 25 individuals who had participated in the first stage underwent more extensive individual interviews.

[Concepts of healthy diet as expressed by primary health care workers in the national capital of Brazil].

Dietary changes in Western society highlight the need for individual and collective health providers to use their strategic positions to actively promote healthy eating habits. Using the research-action methodology in various clinics in the Federal District of Brazil, the present study aimed to identify what these professionals consider a healthy diet. The results indicate an apparent conceptual dichotomy: on the one hand, an idealized version of eating for good health based on the scientific literature; on the other, a concept derived from the ideal, but based on people's day-to-day reality.

Growth and body mass index of Brazilians ages 9 through 17 years.

Obesity during adolescence is considered a strong predictor of adult obesity, and obesity and overweight have been increasing among Brazilian adults. To gauge the relative frequency of overweight among adolescents in Brazil, we compared the distributions of body mass index (kg/m2) and stature in national population based samples of the U.S.

High temporal, geographic, and income variation in body mass index among adults in Brazil.

Objectives: Population-based data on body mass index for developing countries are scarce. Body mass index data from two Brazilian surveys were examined to determine regional and temporal variations in the prevalences of underweight, overweight, and obesity.

Methods: Nationwide surveys in 1974/75 and 1989 collected anthropometric data in Brazil from 55,000 and 14,455 households, respectively.