Birmingham City Council’ Public Health team has won the ‘Award for the Sustainable Diets and Nutrition category’ at a high profile event in Rome today (14.10.2016) attended by Mayors and senior politicians including Italian PM Renzi, plus Vatican representatives.  The prestigious award was bestowed by the MUFPP (Milan Urban Food Policy Pact) which Birmingham signed up to last year and is supported by the UN’s Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.  The Pact has 120 signatories from cities across the world and firmly supports the council’s priorities around health and well-being.  The meeting in Rome coincides with World Food Day and is addressing the challenge of global food security and sustainability including the issue of malnutrition which includes obesity. Obesity costs the City of Birmingham £2.6 billion pounds per year.

Shaleen Meelu (Nutrition Specialist and Co-founder Harborne Food School) and Charlene Mulhern (Childhood Obesity Co-ordinator) from Birmingham’s Public Health accepting the Sustainable Diets and Nutrition MUFPP 2016 award.

Innovative Approaches to Tackling Obesity in Birmingham

The city has started implementing an innovative approach to tackling the obesogenic environment. Highlights include commissioning ‘Shift’, an organisation which specialises in encouraging behavioural change to work with fast food takeaways. The city has also commissioned Crowfunder.co.uk which has a track record in ‘amplifying’ public sector funds and so help the city match fund grass roots initiatives that create a ‘healthy & happy place’. Next week Birmingham will host a national policy summit organised by the Food Foundation. Participants will include policy makers, supermarkets, journalists and supermarket representatives. In addition to this….

• BCC is the first Local Authority in the UK to display nutritional information on all street side advert.
• Birmingham’s ‘Tackling the Obesogenic Environment’ team secured £400K of Section 106 funding for the first healthy revenue project to take place in Longbridge.
• Birmingham has received national recognition for a statutory planning policy to restrict the growth of hot food takeaways.
• An NIHR fellowship is to undertake a comprehensive economic evaluation of all school based childhood obesity services across Birmingham.
• There is National interest in our ‘Developer Toolkit Pilot’ which aims to ensure that planning authorities, developers and architects are engaged at the earliest opportunity to ensure that health and wellbeing of people is a key part of the planning and development process.
• We have expanded the Early Years prevention programme, STARTWELL, to ensure universal delivery of both nutrition and physical entitlement in early years’ settings

Contact:

World Obesity Day http://www.worldobesity.org/what-we-do/world-obesity-day-2016/

World Food Day http://www.fao.org/world-food-day/2016/home/en/

Birmingham Public Health http://birminghampublichealth.co.uk/

Food Foundation http://foodfoundation.org.uk/

Crowdfunder http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/

Shift http://www.shiftdesign.org.uk/

Birmingham Smart City Alliance https://birminghamsmartcityalliance.wordpress.com/about/