Healthy Minds: Student Diet and Health Concerns - Essay Example

?Individual reflective report on the social marketing campaign. Healthy Minds? diet and health concerns Introduction The fond memory we all share as children is probably that of our mother telling us to eat our vegetables, to which children’s universal reaction would be to make a face and try to squirm out of Mama’s piercing gaze, ready to sneak off to play at the first instance that gaze gets distracted for a brief moment. Eating the right food at the right time has always been the problem with young people, because all the good they say is bad for you is so absolutely appetizing, while the food they say is good for you tastes so wicked, A science teacher once taught us that built into our senses is the key to what is good and bad for us. If it smells bad it’s to be avoided, and if it smells good then it’s to be enjoyed. We do this with our food, smelling it to see if it is still good to eat, which is why rotten food emit such a foul odour. The same thing is supposed to be true with taste. If it tastes bad, then it is bad, and should be avoided; and if it tastes good, then it should be partaken of and enjoyed. Or so the theory goes, which is why our prehistoric ancestors had been able to make it out of the prehistoric age and make it possible for us, hundreds of generations hence, to be alive and write about good food tasting good. But given what we know now, about proper nutrition and health, it’s right to say that all food that tastes good is not good for you. The words of the good science teacher notwithstanding, it is important to inform the young people today, who make it a point not to listen and to sneak away at the first instance possible, about the merits of healthy eating (and disadvantages of unhealthy eating) such as the following: (1) Improving the health of prospective mothers would give children a better start in life, reduce infant deaths, and also the numbers of low birth-weight babies; (2) Educational attainment can be improved and risk of mental illness reduced as well as road deaths, if children’s health could be ascertained; (3) The UK could save up to ?100 billion a year if working-age ill health were reduced; (4) If adults turned from unhealthy habits, 30% of circulatory diseases could be avoided, ?2.7 billion of state funds saved due to reduced alcohol abuse, and ?13.9 billion of social costs avoided in terms of reduced drug-fuelled crime (HM Government. 2010). That the adults of today are in a bad way is not debatable. Already, overweight and obesity has begun to cause as much preventable disease and death as does cigarette smoking. While the interest is to get younger people on the bandwagon towards healthier eating habits, findings to be arrived at in this study would also pertain to social marketing for the health habits of adults. This reflective paper will present this writer’s ideas about the way social marketing could create an impact in the minds and hearts of our youth, particularly teen-agers, on the merits of eating a healthy diet and living a wholesome lifestyle. Healthy people, healthy nation The need to develop a healthy generation of people is not the sole concern of the individual, but more important the community and the nation. This is the reason why the UK has prioritized the promotion of healthy eating in its health policy agenda (EPPI-Centre. 2009). What may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, such as the matter of telling children to eat their peas and liver and putting up with the inevitable grimaces, is actually a matter of state priority. The diet children are introduced to early in life become a habit in their teen years, and a compulsion in their adulthood. More than this, during that period in life when children’s bodies and minds develop fastest, starving them of essential nutrients to support this accelerated growth robs them of the maximum potential they would have attained. Long-term studies are still being conducted to determine the exact effects of poor nutrition on health and development in later life (Wachs, 1999; Grantham-McGregor, Fernald & Sethuraman, 1999; Pollitt & Triana, 1999). The stress on proper nutrition for children has, from the 1800s , been focused on the reduction of child morbidity and the promotion of physical growth. However, these factors by themselves are not all encompassing criteria that determine the promotion of competence among individuals. A person’s competence may be seen in the way one can effectively adapt to and interact with the demands and peculiarities of his environment. Traits on which competence may be measured are of five types: cognitive skills, temperament and personality, motivation, self-perceptions, and interpersonal style (Wachs, 1999). Concisely described, a competent person has developed intellectual and interpersonal skills. It appears from empirical studies that the ill effects of poor nutrition not only impact on the individual’s physical condition, but moreso on his mental and emotional health. In poor and undeveloped countries, the lack of nutritious food is entirely caused by the conditions people are constrained to live in. They would, if they could, acquire healthful food, but poverty and social unrest just do not provide the opportunity for them to do so. The situation in developed countries is the entire opposite; people are sufficiently wealthy and food abundant, but given the choice people, particularly in urban areas, choose to acquire foods that still do not meet the requisites of healthy nutrition. The end result of this is still the lack of nutrition, the only difference from poor countries being that calories are abundant, albeit empty calories. At the end of the day, people may be rotund instead of emaciated, but still the physical, mental and emotional deficiencies exist nonetheless. Imagine now an entire generation (or two) of young people opting on a wide scale to starve their bodies and stunt their minds. Fast forward two decades, and these youngsters will be the businessmen, scientists, teachers, professionals, social leaders, politicians, and, may God help us, the president or prime minister of the nation. With less than the adequate level of development these millions of people should have attained as children, there is thus a question about how the implications of reduced competence will affect the general state of the nation – literally – when they become the people in charge. The unhealthy lifestyle has gained a foothold as early as the tail end of the baby boomers, but as they already entered their adult years. Generation X had been teens when fast foods and Clinton era-generated prosperity hooked them on the habit of junk food. But Generation Y grew up with burgers, shakes, fries, and deep-fried anything comprising staple and daily fare. It is with this generation and the one that follows that childhood obesity becomes a recognized disease. They are not to blame, however, but the social milieu that glorified these types of food. The big question is, now that we recognize the fastfood-junkfood mindset for the mental prison that it is, how can we set our children free from it? The imperatives of social marketing to promote healthy eating Why social marketing, and why apply it to healthy eating? (Actually, not only healthy eating may be the subject of social marketing programs, but also higher levels of physical activity in tandem thereto.) It is because the problems of obesity and the overweight condition have become such a widespread phenomenon, that a focused or limited thrust is not going to be sufficient to create a dent in the problem. To have a result that makes a significant difference, the campaign to encourage and convince people to adopt healthier eating habits and lifestyles has to be implemented in a way that reaches a great number of people dispersed over a wide geographical area. It must be able to get the message through with convincing force, and engage not only the interest but also the commitment of people to adapt a life-changing behaviour. By its very definition, this is what marketing is, to connect the product (in this case, an advocacy) with the intended market, to get them to commit to “buying” it. Is it a fact that a large portion of the populace is really overweight? Believe it or not, there are still many people who believe that this is just a myth, that unhealthy eating does not really pose a problem for the majority of the populace, and that those who go around and make doomsday predictions are just making mountains out of molehills. For these people, much evidence abounds to prove that unhealthy eating deserves its designation as an epidemic. For instance a survey of young people aged 11 to 16 years discovered that about 20% did not eat breakfast at all before going to school – and of those who ate breakfast, how many at a healthy breakfast is still undetermined. Also, since obesity and inactivity are the general consequences of not eating healthily, obesity and overweight statistics are also very useful. A recent study of primary school children in England and Scotland, ages 4 to 11 years old, and compared the data to those obtained in 1974 and 1994. While data in the period 1974 to 1984 showed relative stability for the periods 1974 to 1984, the succeeding decade saw a noticeable increase in children’s average body mass index, supporting the position that obesity is widespread and is on the rise among the very young (EPPI, 2009). Academic literature on the social marketing approach of healthy eating When applying a marketing approach, it is necessary to address the basic marketing mix, which includes the 4 Ps – product, place, promotion and price. For apparent reasons, price would necessarily mean that the individual would give up his or her unhealthy eating habits, because this is what is given up in order to “buy” the “product” (which is healthy eating itself). Therefore, we discuss in this section the other Ps – product, place and promotion. Product In a marketing program, the first thing to determine is the product, or what it is the program intends to market. The UK government has embodied its strategy for health in the program “Our Healthier Nation” in 1998, followed by “Saving Lives” in the following year. The thrusts of these earlier initiatives were consolidated in the NHS Plan of 2000. This plan, among others promoted the consumption of fruits and vegetables by as often as five times daily. The following table describes the barriers to healthy eating identified by studies: Barriers to healthy eating as identified in empirical studies on young people (out of N=200 factors studied in 116 studies – EPPI, 2001, pp. 38-39) ‘ N % Individual 69 35 ‘Life event’ factors 0 0 Physical factors 4 2 Psychological factors 65 33 Community 47 24 Family factors 35 18 Interpersonal factors 12 6 Society 59 29 Socio-cultural factors 28 14 Structural factors 31 15 Unfocused/unspecified factors 25 12 Among the factors that were identified, those that were classified at the individual level comprised the most cases (35%), and among these the most were psychological factors (33%) These factors include knowledge, attitudes, decision-making (e.g. problem-solving skills), and psychological traits or attributes (e.g. personality characteristics, self-esteem, self concept). Next to individual factors are factors that have to do with the wider society (29%), which were nearly equally divided between structural factors referring to social institutions (15%), and socio-cultural factors, pertaining to influences of culture (14%). The third set of factors fall under community factors (24%), the greater number of which indicated family factors (18%); interpersonal factors were cited by only 6%, or one-third of family factors. Finally there were several unspecified factors which contribute the miscellany of the factors cited (EPPI, 2001). The foregoing factor review points to the important issues for marketing campaigns to target, if they aim to maximize their effectiveness in addressing the youth on the topic of unhealthy eating. Among the individual sets of factors, the most often cited set of factors are psychological. For this reason, in designing marketing campaigns the market strategists should be able to thresh out what psychological situations in particular cause most of the young people to engage in unhealthy eating. The situation may be as simple as having a favourite craving, or as complex as using comfort food as a way to compensate for a feeling of extreme deprivation or inferiority. For sure, some topics are not the subject of marketing campaigns and would be addressed more by therapeutic counselling, but for the most part they may pertain to the usual insecurities and worries that accompanied adolescence to the teen years and early adulthood. Understanding the issues behind the problem of unhealthy eating may be complicated and require a good deal of market study, but this is critical if everything else in the market campaign is to be done with maximum effectiveness. What makes determining psychological factors more difficult is its nature, that psychological issues are internal to people and are not readily reflected in the external appearance. It is even possible that most young people are not aware that their problems are really psychological, and instead attribute their unhealthy eating more to lack of time to prepare healthier food, the easy availability of junk food, or some similar reason that has to do with situations outside themselves. The time and effort exerted in pointing out the causes and issues that lie at the heart of unhealthy eating will ensure that money spent on the entire project will be worth it, because the goal would be better identified, and all efforts promise to be more effective because of it. Place Adopting a social marketing approach to promote healthy eating explores many avenues. The government has targeted one of those avenues in particular, the use and empowerment of local communities as conduits for expanding the healthy eating campaign. The program conceived to be implemented on a nation wide level will address the root causes of poor health, and seek to reach out to individuals as well as families most in need of support. It aims to be responsive, resourced, resilient and rigorous (HM Government, 2010, p. 7). Its primary thrusts of this initiative are to: (1) create Public Health England by 2012, which will formally take over the functions of the Health Protection Agency (HPA) and the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse (NTA) (2) tap local government to be the principal agent for local health improvement functions, beginning April 2013; and (3) equip local government with new powers and functions, in order to increase local accountability and support integration across the government health agencies involved. Promotion The channel by which the benefits of health consciousness may be dispensed is one consideration in marketing; the manner by which to gain the attention and interest of the intended beneficiaries is another. A study conducted by Dutta-Bergman (2003) on the profiles of healthy and unhealthy eating consumers. The attributes examined were classified into demographic, psychographic, and communicative variables and the respondents numbered 3,388, making this a broad study as far as both subject matter and the number of subjects is concerned. The study was formative as it was informative – it asks the question: “Who is the healthy eater?” and sought answers in terms of the predictive impact of demographics, psychographics, communicative factors and health status, among all possible antecedents of healthy eating. The reason for this is that there has been a successful determination of psychographic attributes for the purpose of enhancing the effectiveness of commercial marketing; therefore there is a possibility of making a similar determination for the purpose of health communication (Dutta & Youn,1999 & Swenson & Wells, 1995, in Dutta-Bergman, 2003). Findings showed that healthy eaters are those who showed greater environmental consciousness and orientation to health factors. This is not make any conclusion on the causality of one by the other (i.e., that eating healthy caused these attributes), but it does establish the connection that both healthy eaters and the environmentally conscious tend to be personally and socially responsible individuals. Furthermore, since healthy eaters tend to be more communicative, this suggests that they exhibit greater information orientation, while unhealthy eaters are more entertainment oriented. The implications of these findings are very useful to the health marketer. Health eaters are those who frequent “responsible” activities, but not unhealthy eaters. Therefore, if information campaigns promoting healthy eating are aired in activities such as marathon runs, Olympic games, or college sports activities, or maybe environmentally geared activities such as community recycling and sustainability projects or philanthropic projects, or any such civic oriented undertakings, then such information campaigns will not reach their targeted audience of unhealthy eaters. The campaign’s targeted venue would have been a faulty one. Nor would information campaigns designed as information campaigns on healthy eating necessarily attract unhealthy eaters. Symposia, seminars, open fora, TV spots used for informative purposes, or such lectures advertised as healthy eating will not pull the desired audience into attendance. However, the unhealthy eater is likely to watch television comedy and similar shows. Unhealthy eater also will play internet games, and go for venues that cater more to entertainment than to information dissemination. If healthy eating campaigners would want to reach unhealthy eaters, they should put their healthy eating advertisements on television comedy programs. The unhealthy eater will also tend to look out for entertainment based content on the Internet. Thus, concept that pertain to healthy eating may be incorporated in Internet games and hobby-related websites, while banner advertisements may be displayed in these domains. (Dutta-Bergman, 2003). Reflections on social marketing for healthy eating among the youth Most of the foregoing are the facts about social marketing for healthy eating that targets mainly students. In this part I present my insights and reflections on the topic, this being a reflective paper. For very young children, the resistance to the lure of unhealthy foods and unhealthy eating habits is entirely dependent upon parents. Little kids do not know right from wrong, and would eat what is provided for them by their parents; their attitudes towards food also depend much on the manner it is provided for them. For slightly older kids who are of school age, they are allowed to make their choice of food which would be available in school. When they stay over at their friends’ home, then they are also exposed to other foods and dining habits. If children don’t bring food prepared at home for their school meals, there is a greater temptation for them to indulge in non-nutritious food. It is during this tender age range that children are most impressionable, and the greatest negative influence on them would be in the form of advertising and aggressive marketing campaigns for these products. Had these advertisement campaigns not been so influential, we should not even be considering a social marketing campaign to counter it! It is for this reason that the UK legislature intended to ban the advertising of fast food in the mass media and the sale of unhealthy junk foods in schools, with the Children’s Food Bill. This is a gigantic step forward, and an effective support to the social marketing campaign initiative to promote healthy eating among the young. The removal of television advertising for fast foods is an excellent move because much of this advertising are targeted psychologically at the young minds of pre-schoolers, with the bright colours, quick flashes of images and attention-grabbing music and jingles. They were actually a form of mental and attitudinal programming, so that by the time they go out with their parents or when they are old enough to go to school, they are attuned to looking for these products that looked so enticing on the television, but that do so much damage to their bodies. By countering these with social marketing campaigns for healthy eating, then the message is balanced out. For older children who have access to new media, however, there are advertisements that proliferate through the internet that could make their way through to them. For these there probably could be no effective ban, particularly since these advertisements appear on the food company’s website and also allow for online purchases. It is in this area that the social marketers should concentrate on, because where the messages for unhealthy eating are able to reach the youth unimpeded, there must be a counteracting campaign to at least provide the qualifying information for the viewer to have both sides of the matter. Probably the most difficult to address in a social marketing campaign would be the audience who are in their late teens to their twenties, who after all still form part of the youth. Too much negative advertising in the form of warnings or doomsday predictions about obesity and unhealthy habits would tend to have the opposite effect on the audience. Information overload and overkill in the condemnation of unhealthy eating may have the exact opposite; for instance, a recent research into students’ eating habits has pointed out that rather than eat a balanced diet, most male students prefer to bombard their bodies with pharmaceutically prepared food supplements, constituting what experts call “disordered eating patterns”. In a survey in Coventry, as many as 50% of male students who participated indicated that what they are concerned more about is their body image, an obsession gained from men’s magazines. However, to achieve the desired physical contour, they resorted to dietary supplements, protein powders, amino acids and creatine, and shunned balanced diet and exercise. They tended to go for the high-protein diet, but very little fruits and vegetables (Arnot, 2010). For young women, on the other hand, the much publicized latest diet fads to slim down is always in vogue, giving the commercial weight loss industry windfall earnings to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year in the developed economies alone (Smith, 1995). Here is the problem of marketing for healthy eating gone terribly wrong. We are bombarded with the message that being obese is bad, and becoming thin is good; but the way many young people choose to become thin is by resorting to commercial supplements and fad dieting, which causes as much health risk as being obese. Somebody should tell these kids that supplements and diets in magazines are just as much unhealthy eating as are fast foods and junk foods. References Arnot, C 2010 “Male students eschew balanced diet in favour of supplements.” The Guardian, 9 November 2010 Cassady, D & Fridinger, F 2002 “Charting the Course for Social Marketing to Promote Diet and Physical Activity Conference Proceedings: Introduction and Overview”, Social Marketing Quarterly, vol. VIII, no. 4 EPPI Centre 2009 Summary – “Young people and healthy eating: a systematic review of research on barriers and facilitators.” EPPI Centre. Available at http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/Default.aspx?tabid=258 Grantham-McGregor, Fernald, & Sethuraman 1999 “Effect of health and nutrition on cognitive and behavioural development in children in the first three years of life. Part 1: Low birthweight, breastfeeding, and protein-energy malnutrition.” Food and Nutrition Bulletin, vol. 20, no. 1. Available at http://unu.edu/unupress/food/V201e/ch07.htm#TopOfPage HM Government 2010 Healthy Lives, Healthy People: Our strategy for public health in England. CM 7985 20 November 2010 Pollitt, E & Triana, N 1999 “Stability, validity, and sensitivity of mental and motor development scales and pre-school cognitive tests among low-income children in developing countries.” Food and Nutrition Bulletin, vol. 20, no. 1. Available at http://unu.edu/unupress/food/V201e/ch06.htm#TopOfPage Shepherd J, Harden A, Rees R, Brunton G, Garcia J, Oliver S, Oakley A (2001) Young people and healthy eating: a systematic review of research on barriers and facilitators. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London. Smith, S E 1995 “The Great Diet Deception”, USA Today Magazine, January 1995, vol. 123, issue 2596. Wachs, T D 1999 “The nature and nurture of child development”. Food and Nutrition Bulletin, vol. 20, no. 1. Available at http://unu.edu/unupress/food/V201e/ch03.htm#The%20nature%20and%20nurture%20of%20child%20development Read More