Let's Take on Childhood Obesity
- Project start date: 13 September 2016
- Project status: Completed
- Project type: Food safety
- Discipline: Nutrition
- Principal researcher/s: Millward Brown
Research objective
- To increase awareness among parents of the health challenges posed by excess weight in childhood, the negative impact this can have on the quality of life, and the importance of tackling this for the long term
- To communicate practical solutions that parents can adopt to tackle the everyday habits that are associated with excess weight in childhood.
Outputs
Research report
- Title: Let's take on childhood obesity
- Publication date: 1 September 2017
- Summary: Evaluation of a 3 year public health campaign.
- Findings:
The following key findings are the main outcomes of a 3 year campaign titled ‘Let’s take on childhood obesity’ as measured on an all-island basis by Millward Brown on behalf of Safefood.
Overall awareness and reach of the campaign
Recall and recognition
- 80%+ recognition of the campaign.
- 85% of parents suggested the ads ‘make me realise what will happen to my children if I don’t take steps to change’ and 69% of parents rated the messages as relevant to their own situation.
Social and digital campaign reach
- Total Facebook reach for the campaign was over 9.6 million
- Total Twitter reach for the campaign was over 3 million
- The campaign hub on the website received over 760,000 views.
Direct marketing
- 360,000 booklets were distributed to over 3,600 crèches, playgroups and day care settings via Early Years and Early Childhood Ireland.
Awareness of obesity
Awareness of the health consequences of obesity
- Aim: To Increase awareness of the future health challenges posed by excess weight in childhood.
- An increase of 11% of parents (from 34% to 45%) are aware that children who are overweight are likely to experience health problems in later life as a result of the campaign.
Core target behaviours (reported change)
- Drinks: Aim: To increase consumption of water at mealtimes and to reduce the amount of sugary fizzy/cordial/smoothie drinks consumed daily. Drinking water at mealtimes increased from 26% to 36%. Daily drinking of fizzies, cordials and smoothie drinks decreased from 50% to 40%.
- Treats: Aim: To reduce the amount of treat foods children are consuming once a day. 45% of parents report trying to reduce the amount of treats their kids eat. There was no significant change in either direction in the numbers of parents giving a treat once a day (29% to 32%).
- Portion size: Aim: To encourage parents to give child-size portions at mealtimes. The number of parents who have tried to reduce the portion size their child eats increased from 12% to 18%.
- Physical activity: Aim: To increase the amount of physical activity a child does to at least 60 minutes a day. No significant change in attempts to increase the amount of physical activity their child gets and remains as per benchmark at 1 in 3.
- Sleep & screen time: Aim: To increase the amount of sleep a child get. The attempts by parents to increase the hours of sleep their child gets saw a decrease from 41% to 27%.
- Recommendations:
- This evaluation suggests that specific messages tend to get more traction, but that many of the key health behaviours relating to childhood obesity are challenging to change for families.
- Parents need further support, both from health professionals and others, to be empowered to address this issue.
- The results contribute to the evidence of a social class gradient and highlight the need to make lower SES groups a priority for further childhood obesity campaigns.
You can download the report below.
Similar research
- Why are adults giving food treats to children? (2017)
- What's on your child's plate? Food portion sizes and the proportion of different food groups eaten by children (2017)
- Lifetime costs of childhood overweight & obesity (2015)
- Body weight and eating habits in 5-12-year-old Irish children (2011)
- Family eating out events "outside of the home" (2010)
