#70 Obesity and systems thinking with Professor Boyd Swinburn

The GP Show

Professor Boyd Swinburn is Professor of Population Nutrition and Global Health in the School of Population Health, University of Auckland. He trained as an endocrinologist but is now a public health physician and conducts research on community and policy actions to prevent childhood and adolescent obesity, and reduce, what he has coined, the ‘obesogenic’ food environment.

He is Co-Chair of World Obesity's Policy & Prevention section and Co-Chair of the Lancet Commission on Obesity. He established the World Health Organisation's first Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, at Deakin University in Melbourne and has also contributed to over 30 WHO consultations and reports on obesity. He leads an international network (INFORMAS) in over 30 countries to monitor and benchmark the healthiness of food environments and the implementation of food policies and actions to reduce obesity.

He is also the patron of the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine and will be speaking at the upcoming June ASLM conference in Auckland.

Today we discuss:

- Obesity now and how we got here - change in dietary intake and lifestyle factors, role of big food and marketing etc

- What is the success and failure rate of current programs?

- What programs have been tried and why have they failed or succeeded?

- What are the biological and cultural factors that make managing obesity so hard?

- What can we change in the systems AND clinical programs to make them more likely to succeed?

- What are the priorities in weight management programs? What are the benefits of modest weight loss?

Enjoy friends!