Creating a benchmark

Policy interventions that influence food intake have developed in piecemeal fashion in the EU, its Member States and elsewhere and they have seldom been formally evaluated. The objectives of this first phase are to identify relevant interventions and their timing, review the existing evidence concerning their efficacy and effectiveness (including cost effectiveness and cost-utility analysis) and identify databases that would permit more complete and formal evaluation in the next steps.

Specific objectives will be:

1. Develop a framework for policy evaluation based around the 3-stage procedure:
   • impact of intervention on attitudes, behaviour and consumption;
   • impact on obesity and health;
   • cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis.
2. Identify policy interventions, including dates of implementation, in European Member States and elsewhere that may have affected healthy eating, including policies based on objectives other than healthy eating outcomes.
3. Identify and review evaluations of policy interventions in member and non-member states and across countries. Identify strength of evidence for success or failure and gaps in knowledge at any of the 3 stages of evaluation.
4. Identify data sets that would be amenable to evaluation in the next phase of the project to fill gaps in the evidence-base. These are likely to be mainly from public funded household surveys of health, diets and nutrition and from other surveys conducted by Universities, research organisations etc where the data are in the public domain. It will be important that the data cover the time periods before and after policy interventions.