Fighting childhood obesity
Childhood obesity is a persistent problem across Europe. According to the World Health Organization, roughly 30 % of children aged 7-9 years are overweight in the region, a third of whom are classed as obese. In the EU, certain Member States in the south, including Cyprus, Greece, Spain and Italy, have more serious issues, with around 40 % of children being classed as overweight. The EU-funded CO-CREATE project was launched in a bid to reduce childhood obesity and its comorbidities across the EU. Over a 5-year period, the project worked with young people and adolescents to co-develop tools and practices that strengthen their role in the creation of new evidence-based policies.
Taking a systems approach to find underlying relationships
The project applied a systems approach to unpick the interlocking factors associated with childhood obesity. “This systems approach has several aspects,” explains Knut-Inge Klepp, CO-CREATE’s principle investigator at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. “It includes constructing models to show the interactions between the various drivers of weight gain, the use of statistical methods to tease out the relationships between the factors embedded in large databases, and the participation of – in this case – young people to help identify possible causes and effects of obesity that they say are important,” he says. Rather than specifying in advance which factors it would explore, the project instead investigated the factors that emerged from these systems and model-building methods. “This is unusual in Horizon-funded research projects, and the Commission’s reviewers took the risk that the outcomes would be scientifically valid and, perhaps more importantly, relevant to the development of policies to tackle obesity among younger people in the region,” notes Klepp.
A multilayered exploration of childhood obesity
The project had several layers, but key among these was the involvement of 15 groups of young people named Youth Alliances, who developed policy briefings and built systems maps. The project also ran 20 forums called Dialogue Forums, where young people discussed with policymakers in governmental authorities and the commercial sector what factors they thought were important and needed attention. “The Youth Alliances also spontaneously came together to produce a Youth Task Force Open Letter, calling for action on obesity issues,” says Klepp.
Disseminating a new understanding of childhood obesity
The project findings include a new understanding of the influences on young people’s health behaviour, including the roles of social media and influencers, along with the importance of mental health, stigma and exclusion. The team also developed a range of new tools for use by other researchers, advocacy groups and policymakers, available through the project website. These include a toolkit to facilitate face-to-face and online meetings between youth and policymakers, two sets of databases on food and physical activity policies implemented in the European region, a website built for young people, and over 40 scientific papers describing the methods and outcomes of the project. “CO-CREATE successfully shows that young people can meaningfully engage with professionals, policymakers and business leaders, and make policy proposals specific to their own experiences,” adds Klepp. “They stated their belief in the need to make structural changes such as raising taxation of unhealthy products, but also supporting greater mental health resilience.”
Keywords
CO-CREATE, childhood obesity, problem, relationships, systems approach, policy, tools
