An EU (FP7) funded project called EATWELL (Interventions to Promote Healthy Eating Habits: Evaluation and Recommendations) aims to overcome unhealthy diets, one of the biggest public health challenges of the 21st century. To encourage people to be more physically active and eat healthier diets, E.U. member states have started different national policy campaigns to establish which interventions are more effective than others, as success can only be achieved through systematic assessment strategies. The EATWELL project was designed to establish these campaigns success- and failure-rates and uncertainties. The results of their findings were announced at the 11th FENS European Nutrition Conference in Madrid on Thursday 27 October 2011 and provide policy makers with advice on creating more successful healthy eating policy interventions.
According to project coordinator Professor Bruce Traill of the University of Reading:
“EATWELL will recommend appropriate interventions for Member States and the EU based on information gained from evaluations of policy interventions and their acceptability to stakeholders, as well as lessons taken from the private sector.”
The international research team of the EATWELL project analyzed healthy eating policy actions, surveyed E.U. citizens, interviewed policy makers and industry. All data was reanalyzed and the team identified more than 100 policy interventions in Europe in two broad categories. One category was aimed at supporting more informed choice through information or education, for example the UK 5-a-day information campaign or nutrition labeling, whilst the other category aims to alter the market environment through price changes or food availability, for example by imposing taxes on foods high in saturated fat or providing disadvantaged consumers with vouchers.
EATWELL discovered a more favorable trend towards information and education actions, as these are less controversial compared with market-level interventions.
So far, only a few cases in Scandinavian countries and the UK used policy actions other than information campaigns, with France being the newest recruit. Mediterranean countries and transition economies have only recently undertaken policy action and are mostly confined to information and education strategies.
Nutrition information, nutrition-related food standards and fiscal strategy policies were almost non-existent in Europe, even though current evidence suggests information and education strategies to be of limited success despite enhancing people’s knowledge, their progress of actions has been slow.
Although Europe is only starting to implement fiscal strategies, such as fat taxes, evidence obtained outside Europe indicates that this strategy leads to large tax revenues but only to small behavioral responses. Although trans-fats and salt intake has been reduced by mandatory reformulation or public/private joint voluntary action, salt intake still remains too high. The team also established that although healthy eating vouchers to the poor are effective, they are expensive for taxpayers. Compared with the generally small impact on diets, the value of lives and disability saved by interventions can be significant. EATWELL scientist, Professor Shankar comments: “when impacts on the public’s behavior or consumption are actually realized, healthy-eating policies are often highly cost-effective interventions”.
The most important task of the EATWELL project, which is vital for the success of public health interventions, was to evaluate how different population sub-groups, such as parents vs. non-parents and people of different educational levels would accept the policies. The team also considered lessons learnt from the private sector as another aspect for the project, such as using various marketing tools aimed to influence consumer’s food choice. They recognized key success factors like trend awareness, media coverage and endorsement from earlier commercial food marketing examples that could be successfully applied to the public sector marketing with an emphasis on those that are low cost. The project concluded that long-term success could only be achieved by consistently and cooperatively building trust in public policy institutions and activities, as well as coupling public information and social marketing campaigns with structural changes.
The EATWELL is an EU FP7 funded project that runs from April 2009 to September 2012.
Written by Petra Rattue