Capturing the attitudes of Welsh decision makers, and tracking the policy and measures implemented by the Government, are critical to mapping progress towards tackling obesity. It is also vital to track the attitudes of those groups that influence the Government, including the food and drinks industry, the media and the public. The media, in particular, plays a key role in shaping the narrative around obesity and measuring the media discourse allows us to detect progress.

A number of challenges prevent the collection of data on the attitudes of these three groups. There is a lack of free programmatic access to most datasets of historical newspapers and other media. While the views of industry and the public might be captured via the likes of industry press releases and social media sites, it is very difficult to obtain unbiased views from these data sources. An alternative approach is to use surveys but these can be prohibitively expensive, particularly if they are carried out regularly, which is necessary to detect changes over time. However, there are ways datasets could be created by extracting information from existing sources that could provide insights on the attitudes of various groups.