Abstract
BackgroundThe encouragement of healthy lifestyles for obesity prevention in young people is a public health priority. The European Youth Tackling Obesity (EYTO) project is a multicentric intervention project with participation from the United Kingdom, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Spain. The general aim of the EYTO project is to improve lifestyles, including nutritional habits and physical activity practice, and to prevent obesity in socioeconomically disadvantaged and vulnerable adolescents. The EYTO project works through a peer-led social marketing intervention that is designed and implemented by the adolescents of each participating country. Each country involved in the project acts independently. This paper describes the “Som la Pera” intervention Spanish study that is part of the EYTO project.Methods/DesignIn Spain, the research team performed a cluster randomised controlled intervention over 2 academic years (2013–2015) in which 2 high-schools were designated as the control group and 2 high-schools were designated as the intervention group, with a minimum of 121 schoolchildren per group.From the intervention group, 5 adolescents with leadership characteristics, called “Adolescent Challenge Creators” (ACCs), were recruited. These 5 ACCs received an initial 4 h training session about social marketing principles and healthy lifestyle theory, followed by 24 sessions (1.30 h/session) divided in two academic years to design and implement activities presented as challenges to encourage healthy lifestyles among their peers, the approximately 180–200 high-school students in the intervention group. During the design of the intervention, it was essential that the ACCs used the 8 social marketing criteria (customer orientation, behaviour, theory, insight, exchange, competition, segmentation and methods mix). The expected primary outcomes from the Spanish intervention will be as follows: increases in the consumption of fruits and vegetables and physical activity practice along with reductions in TV/computer/game console use. The secondary outcomes will be as follows: increased breakfast consumption, engagement with local recreation and reduced obesity prevalence. The outcomes will be measured by the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Study (HBSC) survey at baseline and at the end of the intervention.In the control group, no intervention was implemented, but the outcome measurements were collected in parallel with the intervention group.DiscussionThis study described a new methodology to improve lifestyles and to address adolescent obesity.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02157402. Registered 03 June 2014.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12889-015-1920-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
The encouragement of healthy lifestyles for obesity prevention in young people is a public health priority
The intervention should encourage healthy lifestyles among their peers of the same age in disadvantaged neighbourhoods; the adolescent peer-led model is more effective at achieving positive results in health behaviour than the adult-led models applied in schoolbased studies [33]
Because the European Youth Tackling Obesity (EYTO) is a multicentric project in which each country acts autonomously and because the design and implementation of the interventions are directed by different adolescents in the participating countries, this protocol only reports the description of the Spanish study design
Summary
The encouragement of healthy lifestyles for obesity prevention in young people is a public health priority. The general aim of the EYTO project is to improve lifestyles, including nutritional habits and physical activity practice, and to prevent obesity in socioeconomically disadvantaged and vulnerable adolescents. The improvement of healthy lifestyles through modification of eating habits, daily physical activity practice and avoiding sedentary behaviour are the principle modifications that can prevent or reduce the risk of obesity [9]. Specific recommendations based on expert opinion or supported by clinical studies are proposed [10] These recommendations are the periodic surveillance of obesity status of children and adults, education of children and families about healthy lifestyles, community enrolment in health advice and health education, assure a balanced nutrition and breastfeeding in early infancy and perinatal period, school-based interventions on health education focused on healthy eating and physical activity, homebased interventions, and support of health authority and registration. The authorities should contribute in encouraging people in disadvantaged areas to eat healthier by improving the availability, quality and pricing of healthy food in these localities [11] and encouraging them to perform more physical activity by providing access to sport grounds and green spaces [12]
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