Putting medical nutrition onto the international agenda: Actions by the European Nutrition for Health Alliance

SummaryMost attention from the public, policy makers and health promotion campaigns in relation to nutrition is aimed at obesity. Until recently, this has overshadowed another facet of poor nutrition, whereby inadequate nutritional intake—often associated with disease—leads to weight loss, impaired body function and poor clinical outcome. Malnutrition is highly prevalent but is frequently unrecognised and untreated. It not only compromises health outcomes by impairing response to medical treatment, delaying recovery and increasing mortality, but also severely impacts on the economic and social burden to carers and healthcare systems. Malnutrition is a public health and societal issue of at least equal importance to obesity and must be considered to be a disease in its own right.There is an urgent need to bridge across professional and sectoral divides to find sustainable solutions. To tackle malnutrition requires a coherent and comprehensive strategy, both at the European and national levels. A group of stakeholders from across the European health arena recently formed the European Nutrition for Health Alliance (ENHA) in a united effort to raise awareness of the importance and the urgency of the issue of malnutrition and to build an agenda for action, both at European level and in individual countries. Its overall objective is to raise awareness of the pressing need to prevent malnutrition and ensure that effective nutritional support is available to all those affected in the community and across all clinical settings.The ENHA consists of representatives of several key European stakeholders in the fields of nutrition, health and social care and policy. These partnerships create the basis and serve as an implementation network to reach target groups at EU and national levels. An action plan has been developed and a number of steps have already been taken towards implementation.