PARENTING:HEALTHY EATING campaigns come and go, blasting out messages on the airways about how healthy bananas are or how easy and fast you can cook meals using fresh ingredients.
But, are these campaigns effective? And do they really reach the people who most need to change a lifestyle of poor eating habits and little or no physical exercise?
Later this month, the Little Steps healthy-eating campaign (www.littlesteps.eu) co-ordinated by the HSE and Safefood will be re-launched. It will include more practical tips on how to eat healthily and ideas on how to incorporate physical activity into your daily routines.
Dr Cliodhna Foley Nolan, director of human health and nutrition at Safefood, the food safety promotion board, is the first to admit that families with overweight children haven’t yet got the messages that such campaigns aim to promote.
“Parents in Ireland are still in relative denial about the problems of childhood obesity,” she says. “And the balance of what many children are eating in relation to the amount of exercise they get isn’t right.
“The challenge is that people are saturated by healthy eating messages yet the points are not getting through to them,” she says. “People still don’t seem to realise that when children are overweight, they are storing up trouble for the future. Parents don’t yet see the spin-offs in terms of long-term health for their children in the way they do about other areas in their children’s lives.
Many experts in health promotion now believe that new ways to tackle rising levels of childhood obesity are needed. Some say we need to generate “a social movement for healthy eating”.
Others point to the importance of local community sports and physical activity projects that specifically target groups less likely to want to exercise.
“Healthy-eating campaigns are only valuable when they are supported by national and local efforts by health professionals on the ground,” says Maria Lordan-Dunphy, health promotion development manager with the HSE.
She mentions initiatives such as the community games (sponsored by the HSE) in which more than 500,000 children participate at community and county level.
“Last year, we introduced healthy catering policies for all events in the community games, which meant that we can promote healthy eating as well as participation in the games. She also says that efforts are being made to get more children from disadvantaged communities involved in the community games.
“The big problem still is that we live in an obesogenic environment which means that people have great access to ready-made foods and the marketing of unhealthy foods to children influences the food choices of families,” says Lordan-Dunphy.
The establishment of a new multi-sector group in January is the latest attempt by Government to push forward the implementation of the 2005 Task Force on Obesity.
The group is chaired by Mary Wallace, Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children with special responsibility for Health Promotion and Food Safety.
John Treacy, chief executive of the Irish Sports Council and a former chairman of the Task Force on Obesity, welcomes the new multi-sector group and is keenly aware of the need to promote physical activity more in Ireland.
“Recent research has shown that there is high involvement in organised sport but there is very little informal physical activity,” he says.
Lordan-Dunphy says that a top priority for 2009 is the roll-out of national physical-activity programmes through the Irish Sports Council and local sports partnerships.
National physical-activity guidelines will also be published shortly and just last month the Active Schools Award, co-ordinated by the Mayo Education Centre, was changed to an Active School Flag to encourage schools to create action plans to further the provision of PE, physical activity and sport in schools.
The move away from the more competitive Active Schools Awards to a flag scheme that once gained can be held for three years is deemed to be a more sustainable form of encouragement to schools and communities.
John Treacy puts it succinctly: “What we really need to tackle obesity is a cultural change where physical activity becomes an important part of everybody’s day.
“We need parents to get the message that – even if their children are involved in sport – they also need to be involved in other physical activities.
“Sitting in front of the television or going on Playstation isn’t the answer.
“Healthy campaigns are good and need to be done but physical activity is equally important and we need to hear a lot more about that.”
How childhood weight sows the seeds for later life
Children are four times more likely to be overweight at the age of four if their mothers were overweight when they were conceived.
This point, taken from the HSE’s current position paper on obesity, highlights a striking, yet often ignored, risk factor in obesity.
The same paper points out that childhood is a critical period for developing obesity and therefore an opportune time to prevent it.
If children remain overweight as they get older, their chances of becoming an overweight adult are increased. So, for example, one in three obese girls aged eight or under are at risk of becoming an obese adult, but this rises to two in three girls over 13 who are at risk of becoming an obese adult.
And while numerous studies have shown that healthy-eating patterns are laid down in childhood, studies also show that fitness levels gained in childhood are more likely to be sustained throughout adulthood.
In particular, a recent Australian study found that children aged between eight and 12 years old who develop better movement skills tend to have better cardiovascular fitness during adolescence and have a better chance of being fitter and thus healthier in their adult lives.