Assessment of evaluations made to healthy eating policies in Europe: A review within the EATWELL Project

This paper was part of EATWELL WP1 project. Its objective was to identify healthy eating policies that had been evaluated. Evaluation indicators were awareness of healthy eating, actual food consumption, health outcomes (mostly measured as changes in BMI, nutritional stuatus) and whether a cost/benefit analysis was performed. The study covered EU Member States. A total of 121 policy documents were gathered and 107 retained for the purposes of this paper. From these documents, 22 were evaluated for their impact on awareness or knowledge about healthy eating and 27 for their effect on actual food consumption. Evaluation was more often found for public information campaigns, regulation of meals at schools/canteens and nutrition education programmes. Indicators were not comparable, highlighting the need of concerted indicators in Europe. The study underscores the need to develop harmonized and verifiable procedures as well as indicators for measuring effectiveness and success and for comparing between interventions and countries. EU policies are recommended to provide a set of indicators that may be measured consistently and regularly in all countries. Furthermore, public information campaigns should be accompanied by other interventions, as evaluations may show an impact on awareness and intention, but rarely on consumption patterns and health outcome.