Background. To our knowledge no study has been conducted in Tunisia to describe practice of health care providers towards chronic disease risk factors, particularly among obese adults. Aim. This study is aimed at assessing the level of giving advice on diet and physical activity by health care providers for obese adults comparing to nonobese adults in Tunisia. Methods. A cross-sectional survey was carried out in 2010 for adults aged from18 to 65 years living in the region of Sousse. The questionnaires were administered by an interview made by trained data collectors to standardize the administration of the questionnaire. Anthropometric measurements of height and weight were obtained using a standardized protocol from each participant. Results. The findings from this study indicate that obesity is frequent among adults essentially among women and aged categories. It also shows that obese adults are not adequately diagnosed with few proportion of anthropometric measure evaluation among all the participants. Even if obese participants were significantly more advised than nonobese participants with, respectively, 28.5% to lose weight and 23.8% to increase physical activity, this proportion remains low. 1. Introduction Obesity has become a growing global health problem. There are approximately 937 million and 396 million obese and overweight adults worldwide, respectively [1]. Southern and eastern Mediterranean countries have been particularly affected by this evolution [2, 3]. However, the obesity has well-known associations with all-cause mortality [4, 5], morbidity [6], and disability, resulting in unhealthy life years with poor quality of life [7, 8] and increased health care costs [9, 10]. The World Health Organization report on obesity states that sedentary lifestyle and consumption of high-fat energy-dense diets are fundamental causes of the obesity epidemic [11]. Health promotion strategies, including behavioral interventions aimed at modifying dietary habits and physical activity patterns, are essential in prevention and management of obesity. A substantial part (60–70%) of population makes visits to their general practitioner (GP) each year [12]. However, the studies have shown low rate of counseling on lifestyle changes given to overweight patients in primary health care [13, 14]. Health care providers such as general practitioner, and nurses have the opportunity to confront this epidemic and to educate their patients about weight loss. Physicians and other health care professionals may, however, be missing an important opportunity to counsel
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