Preventing childhood obesity: Contributions from the social sciences to intervention

Programming and implementation of health policies for the prevention of overweight and obesity have traditionally focused on the dissemination of specific messages identifying healthy foods and pointing out the importance of physical activity. Despite recurrent efforts, the prevalence of obesity in both adult and children populations continues to rise. The configuration of preventive proposals seems to neglect the more complex reality of the eating phenomenon, whose nature goes beyond its biological basis. Behind the presence of overweight or obesity, there are factors that exceed individual behaviors, which are constituted as elements of social order. This premise is based on the contributions made from several fields such as anthropology, sociology, and social epidemiology, especially over the past thirty years. This study aims to analyze the traditional models of institutional intervention while making visible the importance of a socially-oriented perspective that takes into account context and network analysis to address the problem of childhood overweight and obesity, centered on the food component.