Sustainable prevention of obesity through integrated strategies: The SPOTLIGHT project's conceptual framework and design

Today BMC Public Health published the paper describing the SPOTLIGHT project, a European Commission FP7-funded project on sustainable prevention of obesity through integrated strategies.SPOTLIGHT comprises a series of systematic reviews on: individual-level predictors of success in behaviour change obesity interventions; social and physical environmental determinants of obesity; and on the reach, efficacy, adoption, implementation and maintenance (RE-AIM) of multi-level interventions to help to prevent obesity. An interactive web-atlas of currently running multi-level interventions will be developed, and enhancing and impeding factors for implementation will be described. At the neighbourhood level, these elements will inform the development of methods to assess obesogenicity of diverse environments, using remote imaging techniques linked to geographic information systems. The validity of these methods will be evaluated using data from surveys of health and lifestyles of adults residing in the neighbourhoods surveyed. At both the micro- and macro-levels (national and international) the different physical, economical, political and socio-cultural elements will be assessed.