International network for food and obesity/NCD research, monitoring and action support: benchmarking food environments towards healthier diets

The World Health Organization (WHO)’s monitoring of risk factors for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) does not include ’upstream’ monitoring of many aspects of food environments that influence population diets. INFORMAS (International Network for Food and Obesity/NCDs Research, Monitoring and Action Support) is a global network of public-interest organisations and researchers that aims to monitor, benchmark and support public and private sector actions to create healthy food environments and reduce obesity and NCDs. This monitoring of public and private sector policies, and their impacts on the healthiness of food environments, seeks to complement existing WHO monitoring efforts.

Methods:
Monitoring areas are divided into process, impact and outcome modules. The two process modules focus on monitoring and benchmarking the policies and actions of the public and private sector. The seven impact modules focus on monitoring and benchmarking the impact of those policies and actions on key aspects of food environments, such as food composition, labelling, promotion, provision, access, availability, affordability, and trade and investment. The three outcome modules focus on monitoring and evaluating changes in behavioural, dietary, physiological and metabolic risk factors, as well as health outcomes. Some aspects of these outcome components are being developed by WHO as part of their global NCD monitoring framework.

Results:
The development of protocols and pilot testing is planned for 2013-2015. The monitoring framework will be trialled in large and small, and high- and low-income countries globally. Within five years, it is expected that all countries will be invited to collect their own data and contribute those data to a global database for benchmarking food environments. 

Conclusions:
Benchmarking data and good practice exemplars will be communicated to policymakers, civil society and the food industry with the aim of stimulating improvements in the healthiness of food environments.