On 4th of March for World Obesity Day, our leaders walked the corridors of Parliament House to keep vegetables firmly on the national agenda.
Our Managing Director Justine Coates, alongside Michael Coote (CEO AUSVEG), Lucy Gregg (GM Public Relations) and Bill Bulmer (Chair AUSVEG), met with key decision-makers to progress the Plus One Serve goal of helping Australians add just one more serve of vegetables to their day by 2030.
Central to this mission is the Pledge for More Veg – an investment instrument designed to mobilise large-scale action in support of the Plus One Serve objective.
Through the Pledge, individuals, community organisations, philanthropic and corporate donors, and leaders across the food and health sectors are invited to formally commit to meaningful actions that increase vegetable consumption nationwide. During the visit to Parliament House, the team met with ministers across the agriculture and health portfolios, strengthening relationships and advancing conversations about the role vegetables can play in improving Australia’s health outcomes.
We look forward to sharing more about these engagements in the near future.
Why vegetables matter
World Obesity Day is a global call to action for a coordinated, cross-sector response to the growing obesity crisis. Today, more than one billion people worldwide are living with obesity, and projections suggest this number could rise to four billion by 2035 – around half of the global population. The human and economic impacts are significant, with overweight and obesity expected to cost the global economy $3.23 trillion by 2030.
In Australia, the National Obesity Strategy recognises that food environments, affordability, availability and everyday defaults play a powerful role in shaping health outcomes.
One clear opportunity lies in increasing vegetable consumption.
Australians are recommended to eat five serves of vegetables each day, yet adults currently consume just 1.8 serves on average.
The National Problem
Vegetable consumption has declined by 19kg per capita since 2001 [2]. This decline is accelerating chronic disease, creating avoidable pressure on Australia’s health system, and widening health inequities:
- 1. Health Burden
Healthcare expenditure on preventable diet-related illness exceeds $16.2 billion annually [4]. Inadequate vegetable intake is a leading preventable risk factor for many chronic diseases [3]. Overweight and obesity are the number one contributing factor to chronic disease in Australia, overtaking tobacco use and fueling the surge in chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, accounting for 85% of the national disease burden and strain on our healthcare system [3]. Without urgent action, Australia also faces a future in which half of children and young people could be overweight or obese by 2050.
- 2. Productivity Loss
Ill-health linked to poor diet not only impacts individuals, but also Australia as a whole. The Productivity Commission estimates that a poor diet contributes to $11.8 billion in lost productivity annually, and 8.4 million workdays lost to diet-related diseases [5]. Poor nutrition contributes to workplace absenteeism, presenteeism, reduced labour participation, and preventable mental health strain. The cost of caring for and treating preventable diet-linked diseases also represents a significant burden on the healthcare system and the economy, as well as on the family members and carers of chronically ill individuals. Increasing vegetable consumption is a key lever available to the Government to progress its productivity-improvement agenda.
- 3. Pressure on Growers
Australian growers are facing rising production costs, labour shortages, extreme climate impacts, supply chain instability, and downward retail price pressure. With 40% of growers considering exiting the industry, and 4 in 5 (80%) citing they would exit if given a fair price for their farms [6], this poses significant threats to future domestic production capacity, as well as economies in rural and regional Australia, where vegetable growing enterprises are often major employers and pillars of communities.
Increasing vegetable consumption would provide a major boost to the Australian vegetable industry, thereby mitigating these threats.
- 4. Food Insecurity and Inequality
The Plus One Serve program is specifically designed to address food insecurity and inequalities through a truly national, settings-based approach that meets people where they are – across retail environments, households, and education settings. By combining population-wide interventions with tailored strategies for priority populations, including First Nations communities, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, young people, and those in remote and low-income areas, the program addresses structural, cultural, and economic barriers to vegetable access, affordability, and consumption.
- 5. 2026-2027 System Gaps
Australia invests only 1.7% of its health budget in preventive health, only $140 per person per year – well below OECD benchmarks [4]. No national healthy-eating campaign has been delivered for more than 15 years [12], over which time we have seen a corresponding decline in vegetable consumption among Australians.
As one key pillar of the Plus One Serve program, a national, evidence-based behaviour change campaign coupled with key setting-based initiatives has the potential to turn the tide and get more Australians eating more vegetables, realising a triple bottom line of benefits for the health of Australians, the national economy and Australia’s vegetable industry.
A simple change with national impact
Plus One Serve is working across industry, retail, health and community settings to make it easier for Australians to add just one more serve of vegetables each day. The fifty plus organisations that are part of the Vegetable Ecosystem, provide structured governance, reporting, measurement and evaluation mechanisms to maintain program integrity and track progress against key investment outcomes and objectives. These are CDC-aligned, including project evaluation, program logic, and independent assessment to ensure transparency and accountability.
It’s a small change that is practical, scalable and achievable and when adopted at population level, the health and economic benefits are significant. Because when it comes to addressing the obesity challenge, more vegetables are a key part of the solution.