Technical Paper 1:
Obesity in Australia: a need for urgent action
3 - Obesity prevention
The World Health Organization defines prevention as ‘approaches and activities aimed at reducing the likelihood that a disease or disorder will affect an individual, interrupting or slowing the progress of the disorder or reducing disability’.
Primary prevention is targeted at reducing the likelihood of the development of a disease or disorder. Secondary prevention aims to interrupt, prevent or minimise the progress of a disease or disorder at an early stage, while tertiary prevention focuses on halting the progression of damage already done.[29]
The main focus of this paper is on the primary prevention of obesity in Australians. Overall, the evidence suggests that the prevention of obesity is the most realistic, efficient and cost-effective approach for dealing with childhood and adult obesity. This is due to the relative lack of success of treating obesity once it has become established, particularly long-term,[30, 31] and because the health consequences of obesity are cumulative and possibly not reversed completely with weight loss.[32]
However, while prevention may represent the most effective strategy to manage obesity, there remains a need to deal with the immediate weight and health problems of people who are currently overweight and obese. There are already significant numbers of obese people requiring treatment, and the numbers will rise regardless of any short-term measures.[33] Many of these people will have co-morbidities and will be at risk of further weight gain over time.
Given the existing magnitude of the problem in Australia (around one in five Australian adults is obese), the prevention of unhealthy weight gain is a more appropriate target. As this encompasses both secondary and tertiary prevention, it allows the scope of initiatives to become broader and cover a spectrum of activity in the prevention of weight gain, including obesity prevention, weight loss and maintenance, and the management of weight-related risk factors.[34]