The Bellagio “Conference on Program and Policy Options for Preventing Obesity in the Low- and Middle-Income Countries” was organized to pull together the current knowledge on how countries are tackling at the large-scale regulatory level obesity prevention.. The conference emerged from need to significantly step up the policies and programs to reduce obesity by learning from some current examples of best practice and strengthening the role of the academic and civil society players in translating global evidence and experience into action at the national level. There was also a need to empower the younger generation of scholars and activists in these countries to carry on this effort. The meeting was also timely because a number of funding agencies in the US, Canada and the UK, at least, were beginning to focus attention on this topic.
The meeting brought together senior and junior scholar pairs from an array of countries ranging from 3 higher income countries (USA,UK and Australia) to a large number of low and middle income countries (Brazil, Chile and Mexico in Latin America; South Africa; Bangladesh, China, India, Singapore, Thailand from Asia; and the Western Pacific Islands) which reflected various programs, problems-all with a need to address their growing obesity problems.
All the Bellagio papers are open access and provided on this website.