Over many decades our food environments have relentlessly been encouraging us to make choices that are harmful to our health, through pricing, marketing and availability.
Factors such as having supportive family and friends, safer communities, positive school environments and adequate resources, are often associated with more physical activity.
Lowering obesity and overweight rates will lift the burden on healthcare spending.
Food parcels are handed to residents at a food distribution organised by the grassroots charity Hunger Has No Religion, in Westbury, Johannesburg.
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South Africa should introduce regulations that mandate the nutritional labelling of fast foods. This will help consumers make informed dietary choices.
Many people with diabetes are undiagnosed.
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Targets for diabetes would improve healthy lives, reduce deaths, and be cost effective. But they should not be for managing diabetes alone; they must include treating hypertension.
Big Food companies producing ulta-processed foods are using a range of key market and political practices to increase their reach, particularly in developing countries.
Healthcare worker, Boitsholo Mfolo, inside the digital x-ray truck at one of Africa Health Research Institute’s mobile screening camps in rural KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.
Samora Chapman/ Africa Health Research Institute
Emily B. Wong, Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI)
South Africa needs a public health response that expands the successes of the country’s HIV testing and treatment programme to provide care for multiple diseases.
Many South Africans live in poor conditions with no access to running water.
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Harsh socio-environmental factors, especially when they happen in the early years of a child’s life, can establish a developmental “biology of misfortune”.
White River Primary school in South Africa, sponsored by Coca Cola.
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A ban on sugary drinks sale and advertisements in schools is likely to hold more promise in improving the diets of children and help prevent obesity in children than voluntary actions.
Diabetes is a leading cause of death in the country.
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Governments must take urgent action to prevent noncommunicable diseases from becoming an uncontrollable epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Sugar-sweetened beverage taxation offers a potential solution.
Appropriately designed taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages would result in proportional reductions in consumption.
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Professor and Programme Director, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand
Director of the Non-Communicable Diseases Research Unit at the South African Medical Research Council, Professor in the Department of Medicine, University of Cape Town