A coalition of around 40 US retailers, NGOs and food and beverage manufacturers have joined forces to create an organisation designed to help reduce obesity.

The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, which wants to reduce childhood obesity by 2015, will promote ways to help people achieve a healthy weight through “energy balance”. It focuses on three areas – the marketplace, the workplace and schools.

Companies involved include; Campbell Soup Co., General Mills, ConAgra Foods, Kellogg Co., Unilever, Mars, Nestle and PepsiCo.

“The stakeholders involved in this commitment recognize that by working together we can make a real difference on the obesity issue in our country,” said David Mackay, president and CEO of Kellogg and chairman of the board of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation. “We are united in an unprecedented, collaborative and focused effort to help children and adults achieve better energy balance between calories in and calories out.”

The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation will focus on the promotion of balancing calories to people in the places where they spend much of their time, to consumers in the marketplace, to employees through workplace programmes and to children in schools.

Members of the foundation have committed US$20m to the joint initiative, which will include a national public education campaign on energy balance, to be announced.

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