Table 2 Global policy recommendations for healthy food environments
From: Mapping of food environment policies in Zambia: a qualitative document analysis
Category I: Strategies to promote food and nutrition education and awareness of healthy diets |
 1. Include nutrition (health literacy) in the curricula offered in primary and secondary schools [27,28,29,30] |
 2. Develop national food or nutrient based guidelines [30] |
 3. Implement mass media/public and social marketing campaigns based on national dietary guidelines to promote healthy diets and consumption of nutritious foods including traditional foods [28, 31, 32] |
Category II: Regulations and legislative tools |
 4. Implement tax measures on unhealthy foods [28,29,30, 32] |
 5. Provide incentives such as subsidies for production of healthy food options including reformulation [28,29,30, 32, 33] |
 6. Implement comprehensive policy on labeling of food [28,29,30, 32] |
 7. Regulate marketing of food and non-alcoholic beverages to children including in schools [29, 30, 32,33,34,35] |
Category III: Strategies to promote healthy food production and access to healthy food |
 8. Strengthening of agriculture policy to improve supply of locally grown nutritious food [27,28,29,30, 33] |
 9. Strengthen linkages between production, demand and consumption of nutritious food through value chain development [27, 33] |
 10. Adopt policies that support healthy diets at school by engaging food retailers and caterers including school tuck-shops to improve the availability, affordability and acceptability of healthier food products [32, 33] and limit the availability of products high in salt, sugar and fats [29] |
 11. Explore potential of urban and peri-urban agriculture initiatives such as school and community gardens and issuing contracts to local food growers to supply fresh produce and support the diversification of school meals and diets of schoolchildren and adolescents in cities [27, 29] |
 12. Develop and enforce national food safety legislation and regulations ensure that food producers and suppliers throughout the food chain operate within internationally recognized standards, guidelines and codes of practice on food safety and quality [28,29,30] |
Category IV: Social protection strategies |
 13. Incorporate nutrition objectives into social protection measures for vulnerable populations e.g. cash transfer and school feeding program [28, 34] |
Category V: Guiding principles for governments |
 14. Governance   • Provide political will and commitment to nutrition [28, 30]   • Coordinate action and ensure policy coherence across sectors such as agriculture, youth, recreation, sports, education, commerce and industry, finance, transportation, media and communication, social affairs and environmental and urban planning [28,29,30, 34, 35]   • Establish nutrition coordinating mechanism such as task force or advisory bodies [29, 34]   • Develop responsive, culturally appropriate policies to the specific country context [27, 28, 32, 35]   • Provide means and platform for monitoring progress towards targets [28, 30, 36] |
 15. Multisectoral collaboration   • Engage all relevant stakeholders including NGOs, civil society, communities, the private sector and the media pupils, parents [27, 29, 30, 36]   • Manage potential conflicts of interests [35, 36]   • Integrate nutrition objectives into food and agriculture policy, programme design and implementation, to enhance nutrition sensitive agriculture, ensure food security and enable healthy diets [30, 36] |