Whanau Pakari: Perception versus reality – How active are obese New Zealand children?

Abstract

help evaluate the nature of the ‘healthiness’ of the food environment in these neighbourhoods. 24 different food outlet types were identified from an observational audit of Australian suburbs’ food environments. A purpose-designed questionnaire was developed to obtain expert opinion on the relative healthiness of food outlet types using Delphi method with two survey rounds. At the beginning of the Delphi survey, original scores were proposed for each food outlet type based on available literature, classifying them into 5 categories of ‘healthiness’. Median scores for food outlet types from Rounds 1 and 2 were highly correlated with the originally proposed scores (0.97 and 0.96 respectively, p = 0.01). A ‘healthiness’ score is proposed using the median scores of round 2 of this survey to compare food environment across Australian suburbs; and further studies can explore relationships between the suburbs ‘healthiness’ score and diet habits of the suburbs population.