On Thursday, Oct. 6, Barry Popkin, PhD, W. R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, delivered a keynote address at the 38th Annual Meeting of the German Obesity Society. In his talk entitled Large-scale regulatory and fiscal policies for tackling obesity and creating healthier diets,he spoke about the major global shifts in dietary patterns driving increases in overweight and obesity worldwide. He also outlined major health policy successes to date, including taxation and other fiscal policies, shifts in food procurement and school feeding programs, front-of-package warning labels, and restrictions on food marketing.
The following week on Wednesday, Oct. 19, Popkin gave a keynote address to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development NICHD Global Health Conference. His talk entitled Socio-ecological Factors and the Double Burden of Malnutrition Among Children and Adolescents in Low- and Middle-Income Countries focused on the double burden of malnutrition and the new nutrition reality. He highlighted the trends and underlying factors linked with changes in both overweight and undernutrition and showed how in many countries (including nearly all low- and middle-income countries), stunting and wasting — key measures of undernutrition — are slowly declining while overweight and obesity are rapidly increasing among children.