Healthy Eating, Active Living: An action plan to improve diet, increase physical activity and tackle obesity (2008-2011)

7 Developing a Longer Term Strategy to Tackle Obesity

This plan outlines the range of actions that we will take over the next three years in continued support of our diet and physical activity strategies and on additional focused interventions to tackle obesity in Scotland. However, this work will only be a small element of the comprehensive cross-Government and multi-disciplinary action that is required if we are truly to halt rising obesity levels.

Over the coming months we need to engage across all Government and other sectors to identify opportunities to influence the environments and pressures that shape our lives in a way that supports healthy weight rather than promoting weight gain. We already have good examples of Government policies that have begun to reshape the way we live our lives to make them more healthy, such as the exemplary work in our schools to promote greater activity and improve diet. But we recognise that schools are only one of the many settings in which we can address this challenge. We need to ensure that all policy areas that can contribute to supporting healthy weight do so giving appropriate priority to achieving the goal of tackling obesity.

This is clearly not only a role for central government. Local authorities working hand in hand with their local service delivery partners, including the third and private sectors, have a crucial contribution to make to the long term strategy on obesity. We will support and build on existing good practice by those local authorities who have already begun to reshape their communities in innovative ways that impact positively on health and contribute to tackling obesity.

We will enter into dialogue with all our partners to help develop a longer term and wide reaching strategy to tackle obesity. We are committed to working across Government and with all sectors of Scottish life to develop this strategy and we will put in place structures and mechanisms to monitor our progress in achieving this.

• We will working across Government and with all sectors of Scottish society, develop a longer term strategy to tackle obesity.