An expanding population gets more in bad diets and less on workout. Why is it so? How to, or how do you motivate people towards a healthier lifestyle?

An expanding population gets more in bad diets and less on workout. Why is it so? How to, or how do you motivate people towards a healthier lifestyle?

The co-epidemics of sedentary behaviour and unhealthy eating patterns across populations globally ranks among the top 10 public health problems of our time, creating a giant toll in chronic disease — such as overweight/obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and selected cancers — that severely impacts service delivery while worsening overall quality of life. In order to develop solutions that can generate authentic and sustainable behaviour change, it is essential to gain a proper understanding of the drivers of these trends.

There are many interrelated factors that contribute to the widespread prevalence of unhealthy eating and physical activity practices. In particular, there has been a dramatic restructuring of food environments over the past few decades. Ultra-processed foods — designed to be ultra-palatables, containing specific ratios of fat, salt and sugar — have now created food environments where the easiest, cheapest and most advertised option is exactlythe one that offers the least nutrition. For the most time-stressed individuals and families who live under very tight financial constraints, the reality that fast food and processed choices are much more obtainable than healthier options, often wins out over a theoretical preference for better foods. And it is not primarily a failure of individual willpower, but a well-anticipated reaction to an environment engineered specifically by certain powerful commercial interests to drive maximum consumption of their products.

The nature of static behaviour, likewise, has been encoded into present day life by powers acting well above the individual level. Desk-based and digital professional work, the nature of car-dependent urban environments that remove incidental physical activity from daily life, and unprecedented access to passive entertainment via digital platforms have all created circumstances under which physical inactivity is a default rather than an exception for millions. When the demands of daily life are such that some significant physical activity would be a voluntary action (requiring a planned and time-consuming event separate from all other competing obligations), most people — particularly those with challenging jobs and parental responsibilities — will never fulfil evidence-based activity guidelines, regardless of intentions.

In addition, these structural drivers are compounded by psychological and socioeconomic factors. These are coinciding with high costs of chronic stress and the aggravated anxiety, inadequacy, and depression associated with today s world that we are struggling more than ever to cope with by going for high calorie comfort foods through immediate appetitive responses along our path in abandoning any exercise paper. The disparities of financial capitalism extends to the cost and access to nutrient-dense whole foods that are regularly considerably less costly than calorically dense processed foods for lower-income cohorts; the poverty-poor nutrition nexus is systemic inequality rather than personal failure.

Promoting healthier lifestyles requires interventions at structural, community and individual levels. Governments have hugely influential policy levers for reconfiguring food environments — taxes on ultra-processed foods and sugar-sweetened beverages, subsidies on fresh produce and whole foods, and tight controls surrounding the marketing of unhealthy products to children have all been shown to be measurable effective at changing population dietary behaviour where implemented with sufficient commitment and scale. Reforms in urban planning that emphasise walkable neighbourhoods, improved cycling infrastructure, and easy access to green space, along with mixed-use development can service the needs of the population without creating dependency on cars and introducing physical activity into daily life rather than it being merely an optional pursuit reserved for leisure.

Workplace wellness initiatives—flexible schedules that encourage physical activity, the provision of health foods in work settings and organisational cultures that really support work–life balance rather than merely profess it—are another major lever as working adults spend most of their waking hours in professional environments designed to impact on health behaviour.

Community-based programmes — which can reach populations whose direct contact with formal health services is minimal through schools, religious institutions, sports clubs, and healthcare settings — also provide easy access to practical cooking skills education and subsidising exercise opportunities as well as the social support that individual behaviour change always requires but hardly ever receives. The case for the preventive revolution, called forth by evaluation data from effective public health campaigns (the equivalently strong precedent being smoking reduction), is that population-wide behaviour can be changed where there is no lack in political commitment or investment to structural, environmental and educational responses.

The unhealthy diet and physical inactivity epidemic is not simply an issue of individual willpower but rather, underlain by structural conditions. To tackle it effectively, governments, urban planners, employers and food industries – along with communities – must work at sharing the responsibility of designing an environment where healthy choice is not just easy but really easy — a reasonable transformation that may seem ambitious but which evidence shows is entirely feasible.