The Development and Potential of a Digital out of Home Food Environment Monitoring Platform.

The rapidly growing field of digital meal delivery platforms has transformed the out of home (OOH) food environment, presenting both opportunities and challenges for public health. This paper introduces the development and potential of a novel digital platform designed for monitoring the OOH food environment. Drawing on publicly available data from meal delivery applications, this platform provides valuable insights into the landscape of digital food offerings, such as the most common restaurants per region, average caloric content per meal type, and energy value per monetary unit. This research addresses the current void in regulations for this digital environment, particularly around food labeling and provision of nutrition information. Even though the platform has significantly improved our understanding of the digital food ecosystem, it highlights gaps, primarily due to the lack of publicly available individual data and inconsistencies in provided information. Despite these challenges, the proposed digital platform holds considerable promise for better understanding the digital food environment, supporting healthier food choices, and informing future policy interventions aimed at regulating the online food environment. This research advocates for mandatory regulations in the digital food sector to ensure comprehensive, comparable, and transparent nutrition information and equality in access to nutritious foods.

Rising to the challenge: Introducing protocols to monitor food marketing to children from the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe.

Unhealthy marketing has been unequivocally linked to children's food preferences, requests, purchases and eating behaviors and hence to childhood obesity. Regulating children's exposure to such marketing has been identified as a key challenge to which States must rise. Regulation mandates the need for monitoring and hence for credible data that are comparable between countries, regions and across time. However, there are major challenges presented by the complexity of the digital marketing ecosystem including the personalized targeting with persuasive, exploitative advertising to which children are subject. This narrative review identifies challenges faced by researchers in the digital ecosystem; reviews recent papers attempting to address these and specifies benefits and limitations; and introduces a set of WHO protocols with templates and guidance for studies of food marketing to children.

Trans fatty acid elimination policy in member states of the Eurasian Economic Union: Implementation challenges and capacity for enforcement.

Removing trans fatty acids (TFAs) from the food supply in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) are one of the most effective public health interventions for reducing the risk of noncommunicable diseases. EAEU Member States have taken important steps to reduce TFA in oil and fat products to <2% of the total fat content. The authors summarize existing policies in the region, identify challenges in implementation, and suggest measures to strengthen regulation to achieve compliance with WHO guidelines. Documents published between 2011 and 2019 in Russian and English were reviewed, including EAEU and Member State restrictions on TFA in food products, data on TFA content in foods, and food labeling policies. The EAEU has established TFA limits in oil and fat products; however, Member States are currently not achieving the WHO guideline of <2% of total fat content in food products. A lack of harmonized monitoring systems and sanctions create challenges in monitoring compliance. The authors recommend developing an EAEU-wide monitoring system to test TFA content and organize population intake surveys. Discrepancies exist within regulatory frameworks that allow higher levels of TFAs in dairy products and infant formula. The authors recommend extending the current regulation to mandate TFA limits for all food products. Research found that strengthening regulation to meet the WHO guidelines should be prioritized. Member States should implement actions to replace TFAs with healthier fats, develop standardized surveillance methods, and scale-up strategic communication to ensure the food industry and the public follow public health recommendations to protect the health of the EAEU population.