OBESITY is the biggest contributor to disability in the European Region, a WHO expert told EMJ in the margins of the 79th World Health Assembly.
Kremlin Wickramasinghe, Regional Adviser, Prevention and Health Promotion Division, WHO Regional Office for Europe, said that countries must start with early childhood interventions.
Global Patterns in Overweight and Obesity
Forces including greater food security in some countries, socioeconomic development, shifts in diet and physical activity – driven by globalisation and industrialised food systems – have created increasingly obesogenic environments, WHO reports.1
It follows that there is now a “global public health crisis” whereby more than 1 billion people are living with obesity and rates are increasing in nearly every country.2
Wickramasinghe said: “In terms of the risk factors for exposure to obesogenic environments, we see similarities in both high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries.
“Some countries are a little more behind in the political transition than others.
“So, what we are telling low- and middle-income countries is they don’t need to wait until their childhood obesity levels rise to 40% to take action.
“In some of those countries, overweight and obesity is 10% or 15%, compared to 40% in some Western European countries.”
Childhood Obesity Prevention Strategies
Wickramasinghe, addressing economic fears around prevention policies, called for political acknowledgement that investing in early childhood interventions will increase workforce productivity later down the line, in countering health-related absenteeism.
He called for comprehensive, mandatory, and universally applied childhood obesity prevention strategies, adding: “If you want to address obesity, then you have to start from childhood obesity.
“That’s the only way we can turn this around.”
The expert highlighted that baby foods are containing increasingly high levels of sugar and very few countries in Europe provide free schools meals, marking additional barriers to early prevention.
Policy Direction
On 19th to 10th May, the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Moldova led a high-level policy dialogue on nutrition and obesity prevention.
Speaking on the summit, Wickramasinghe said: “We have evidence that these are cost-effective policies.
“They will improve nutrition and reduce obesity levels.”
However, a multi-sector approach is necessary for the subsequent challenge of implementation.
He said: “Policies cannot be implemented by just the health sector.
“If they are about labelling, provisions in schools and the education sector, or marketing restrictions – they cannot be led by the health sector.”
This comes amid a WHO Strategic Roundtable at the 79th World Health Assembly on 20th May, at which the Assembly explored how systems can better respond to noncommunicable diseases and challenges in managing multimorbidity, aging populations, and widening inequities.
Assembly delegates also approved, on 21st May, a resolution recognising steatotic liver disease as a growing contributor to the global burden of noncommunicable diseases – closely linked to obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
References
1 World Health Organization. Obesity and overweight. 2025. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight. Last accessed 28 May 2026.
2 NCD Risk Factor Collaboration. Worldwide trends in underweight and obesity from 1990 to 2022: a pooled analysis of 3663 population-representative studies with 222 million children, adolescents, and adults. The Lancet. 2024;403(10431):1027–1050.
Featured image: Dragan on Adobe Stock
