Teens averse to obesity message may swallow ’OB’

Mar 18 2004

Jenny Rees, The Western Mail

IT is often said that the United States shows us things that we in the United Kingdom get later, after they have crossed the Atlantic.

Popular culture, fashions, language and cultural styles have often arrived at our shores in this way.

More recently, the two countries have again been linked by their common epidemic of obesity, and the related problems of diabetes, that are the new major public health issues of the next two decades.

The United States is the most overweight nation on earth, largely due to its combination of heavy fast food consumption and an inactive lifestyle. Indeed, I can remember myself seeing Americans in Disney World whose legs were thicker than my entire body!

The US has, not surprisingly, also been in the forefront of efforts to use education to try to stop the obesity epidemic, and there may be a chance of using the experience of what happened there to help us in England and Wales as we attempt to defuse the problem ourselves.

Indeed, I was employed by their Federal Government last summer to help develop their programmes - a highly salutary experience, as it turned out.

The first thing to note is that we know more about what not to do than what to do. Adding an anti-obesity public-health message to the curriculum by sticking into it new public health add-ons doesn’t work because the message is only given to children in a fraction of their school time.

Likewise, using posters to convey good behaviours such as cutting out fast food and ceasing being a couch potato doesn’t work either, because children have learned to avoid eye contact with anything that looks like official propaganda.

Even getting staff on board to "model" good health behaviours in their own lives, so that they may naturally show pupils what is needed, only produces a take-up of about a quarter of school staff - who themselves seem to find it hard getting off the couch, as it were.

What might work in England and Wales - if the examples of what has been tried above, will not?

Firstly, given that no one uses words of more than a couple of syllables in "pupil peer-group speak" anymore, we need to re-name obesity OB, as a shorthand.

Secondly, we need to use the culture of the pupils by enlisting the support of their teen idols in the OB crusade - Buffy the Vampire Slayer avoiding junk food or The Darkness getting super fit, would be two examples.

Thirdly, we need to be much cleverer in schools than we have been so far. Using hard copy posters is naff when children live in an electronic world. We need to use CDs and particularly DVDs to get messages across.

Fourthly, rather than attempting to insert an anti- obesity curriculum subject in the schools, we need to ensure that an elaboration of the causes and effects of obesity roots across the curriculum.

There is a geographical component to be explored, in the effect on agriculture of the domination of agribusiness. There is a historical dimension, as in the present rapid change in eating habits. There is an economic dimension in the effects of an increasingly monopolistic situation in the potato, chicken, beef and - with the arrival of the even- more calorie-laden "healthy alternatives" - salad markets.

And, finally, there is the issue of the teachers. Anti- obesity messages are not just the province of the PE department, or the domestic science staff, but need to be mainstreamed and not ghettoised.

Teachers need the time to re-evaluate their personal health goals, and high-quality training to pick up the right health messages for themselves.

The message from the failure of teachers to take up ICT in their lessons, is that teachers are more likely to see something as benefiting the pupils when it has been of use to themselves - so increasing teacher use of ICT is now seen as the way of increasing pupils’ use.

If teachers can see their own life change through healthy habits, then so will their pupils.

The whole tone of our campaign needs to be different, too. Campaigns to stop people completely from drinking or smoking, or indulging in other self-injurious behaviours, rarely work. Rather, it seems more useful to persuade people to moderate their behaviour. For, eating two burgers a week rather than one a day seems to be an appropriate message. For fitness, using the school weights once or twice a week rather than running a marathon would seem the way to put it. Less may be more!