Mukanu Mulenga Mary, Thow Anne Marie, Delobelle Peter, Mchiza Zandile June-Rose
School of Public Health, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, 7535, South Africa.
Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, 2006, Australia.
BMC Nutr. 2023 Oct 2;9(1):112. doi: 10.1186/s40795-023-00766-1.
The food environment in which people exercise food choices significantly impacts their dietary patterns. Policies that limit the availability, affordability, and access to unhealthy food while increasing that of healthier alternatives help build healthy food environments, which are required to address the double burden of malnutrition. This study aimed to assess the availability of food environment policies in Zambia.
We applied a two-step qualitative document analysis to identify policy content relating to healthy food environments from global and Zambia-specific nutrition-related policy documents. In the first step, global policy documents were analyzed to develop a reference point for globally recommended policies for healthy food environments. In the second step, Zambia's nutrition-related policies were analyzed to identify content relating to healthy food environments. The identified policy content was then mapped against the global reference point to identify food environment policy gaps.
Our analysis of global policy recommendations identified five broad categories of policy provisions: information and education based; regulatory and legislative tools; strategies to promote production and access to healthy food production; social protection-based strategies and guiding principles for governments relating to multisectoral collaboration and governance. Our analysis found that Zambian Government policy documents in the health, agriculture, education, and national planning and development sectors have policy provisions for healthy food environments. While these policy provisions generally covered all five reference categories, we found policy gaps in the regulatory and legislative tools category relative to global recommendations.
Zambia's food environment policy landscape must include globally recommended regulatory and legislative policy measures like restricting the marketing of unhealthy foods and non-alcoholic beverages to children. Nutrition policy reforms are required to facilitate the introduction of regulatory and legislative policy measures that effectively address the double burden of malnutrition in Zambia.
人们做出食物选择的饮食环境会显著影响其饮食模式。限制不健康食品的可得性、可负担性和获取渠道，同时增加健康食品的可得性的政策，有助于构建健康的饮食环境，这是应对营养不良双重负担所必需的。本研究旨在评估赞比亚饮食环境政策的可得性。
我们采用了两步定性文献分析法，从全球和赞比亚特定的营养相关政策文件中识别与健康饮食环境相关的政策内容。第一步，分析全球政策文件，为全球推荐的健康饮食环境政策制定一个参考点。第二步，分析赞比亚的营养相关政策，以识别与健康饮食环境相关的内容。然后将识别出的政策内容与全球参考点进行比对，以确定饮食环境政策差距。
我们对全球政策建议的分析确定了五大类政策规定：基于信息和教育的；监管和立法工具；促进健康食品生产和获取的战略；基于社会保护的战略以及政府在多部门合作与治理方面的指导原则。我们的分析发现，赞比亚政府在卫生、农业、教育以及国家规划与发展部门的政策文件中有关于健康饮食环境的政策规定。虽然这些政策规定总体上涵盖了所有五个参考类别，但我们发现，相对于全球建议，监管和立法工具类别存在政策差距。
赞比亚的饮食环境政策格局必须纳入全球推荐的监管和立法政策措施，如限制向儿童推销不健康食品和非酒精饮料。需要进行营养政策改革，以促进引入能够有效应对赞比亚营养不良双重负担的监管和立法政策措施。
