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REVIEW article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health and Nutrition
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1477401
This article is part of the Research Topic Holistic Approaches to Understanding Obesity and Metabolic Diseases in Urban Environments View all 8 articles
Tackling the Complexity of Obesity in the US Through Adaptation of Public Health Strategies
Provisionally accepted- 1 School of Medicine, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, United States
- 2 Amber Huett-Garcia Consulting, Memphis, United States
- 3 College for Public Health and Social Justice, Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Missouri, United States
Obesity prevalence continues to rise in the US despite more than two decades of recommendations and guidelines for its prevention and management. The encouragement of individuals to adopt a healthy diet and lifestyle has remained the focus of clinical interventions and recommendations despite these efforts alone proving ineffective for long-term weight management. There are many recognized barriers to obesity prevention and management in community and clinical settings including political factors, social determinants of health, weight bias and stigma, and inequities in access to treatment and insurance coverage. We discuss these barriers in more detail and attempt to identify areas where public health and healthcare approaches can be better aligned, allowing for better advocating by public health officials to enable a more meaningful and population-level change in obesity prevention and management in the US.
Keywords: Equity, healthcare, Obesity, policy change, Public Health, US
Received: 07 Aug 2024; Accepted: 25 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ard, Huett-Garcia and Bildner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jamy Ard, School of Medicine, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, United States
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