Abstract
ObjectiveTo determine parental willingness-to-pay (WTP) for childhood obesity prevention.MethodsCross-sectional data from the follow-up measurements (2011) of a health promotion programme in German primary schools. Data collection included anthropometric measurements of children and self-administered questionnaires for parents, including WTP assessment. Mann-Whitney U-Test was used for differences between groups, and regression analysis to identify factors associated with general WTP and amount of WTP.ResultsFrom 1 534 parents, 97.8% considered overweight/obesity to be serious public health problems. A general WTP to reduce the incidence of childhood overweight/obesity by half, was declared by 48.8%. Parents of overweight/obese children showed with 61.4%, significantly more frequently, their general WTP than the others with 47.2% (p = 0.001). Mean WTP was €23.04 (99% confidence interval (CI) [22.45; 23.75]) per month. Parents of centrally obese children showed significantly higher WTP than parents of the other children (p = 0.001). General WTP and the amount of WTP were associated with the central obesity of the child, migration status and household income. Additionally, general WTP was associated with maternal obesity.ConclusionsNearly half of the parents were willing to invest in prevention of obesity. The general WTP significantly occurs more often and with higher amount in affected parents.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13561-014-0020-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
The ongoing threat from the worldwide overweight and obesity epidemic is far from being under control
The aim of this study is to evaluate the real WTP in a sample of parents of primary school children, taking part in the evaluation of the health promotion programme “Join the Healthy Boat” in southern Germany [20]
In comparison to the others, those with a general WTP were more frequently overweight and obese themselves, considered overweight and obesity as a problem, found it important to be thin in order to be attractive, considered their child too corpulent and had a higher family income
Summary
The ongoing threat from the worldwide overweight and obesity epidemic is far from being under control. Primary school children with a waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) beyond the boundary value of 0.5 have more visits to a physician and more sick days than their normal weight peers [6]. This leads to higher health care costs or a higher utilization of health care services for obese children [7,8,9]. Trasande detected in his cost of illness approach, that the economic
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