Marie-Laure Frelut
	Marie-Laure Frelut is a Paediatrician. She became involved in the field of childhood obesity in the 1990s when she had to run an inpatient unit for severely obese adolescents.
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	Andrea Vania
	Independent researcher. Previously, Full Researcher and Aggregate Professor at the Mother-Child and Urologic Sciences Dept. of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Medicine of ‘Sapienza’ Rome University.
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Preface

The ECOG’s eBook on childhood obesity is an initiative aiming at offering for free to anybody working or coping with childhood obesity a broad range of information. Obesity is now much better understood so that knowledge in all fields from epidemiology to biology, clinics or management has made considerable progress. The reader may focus on chapters dedicated to his own specialty or decide to discover fields he is less familiar with.

To reach this goal paediatricians, psychologists and child psychiatrists, specialists in physical activity, physiotherapists, nutritionists, biologists, epidemiologists, lawyers, economists from Europe and other countries were solicited, and they warmly supported this initiative. Authors belong to 13 European countries and the USA, more than 30 Universities or Research Institute, WHO, the World Obesity Federation. All accepted to write chapters focusing on their specific fields of competence to allow anyone discover it and further use it in its daily practice or research.

The eBook process which started in 2014 is a dynamic one. Therefore, 25 among the 49 current chapters have been updated or newly introduced during the last two years, as part of a continuous improvement. All chapters are downloadable.
In order to facilitate its use all around the world, most of the English versions have been translated, and are now available, into 4 other languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian.

We warmly thank all the supporters of this friendly network, from authors to translators and ECOG team and hope that you will find here a stimulating basis to your projects and needs.

On behalf of the ECOG,
Marie-Laure Frelut , Editor
Andrea Vania, Co-editor