Putting medical nutrition on to the international agenda: actions by the European Nutrition for Health Alliance.

In the European Union, most attention from the public, policymakers 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 a poor clinical outcome. Malnutrition 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. 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.