Project

Meal boxes as an innovative intervention strategy to enable healthy food choices and a healthier home food environment among low-income families

Code
G013824N
Duration
01 January 2024 → 31 December 2027
Funding
Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Promotor-spokesperson
Research disciplines
  • Social sciences
    • Consumer behaviour
  • Medical and health sciences
    • Health promotion and policy
    • Public health nutrition
Keywords
participatory systems approach health inequalities food choices
 
Project description

Parents have been identified as the most important actors in affecting children's dietary behaviours, especially via structure-based food parenting practices: food availability, role modelling, and family meal routines. Families with a low socio-economic status (SES) have higher obesity prevalence rates, less optimal diets and less supportive home environments for healthy eating compared to high-SES counterparts. Therefore, it is important to find effective ways to improve structure-based food parenting practices among low-SES families to change children's dietary patterns and thus prevent non-communicable diseases early in life. Healthy food choices of parents are a key antecedent for developing optimal structure-based food parenting practices, as food shopping constitutes a large portion of the food available at home and eaten by the family. This project aims to promote and enable healthier food choices among low-SES parents of primary-school aged children. Meal box provision is chosen as innovative intervention to influence food choices of low SES parents as it enables us to take a participatory systems approach in which we target both the parents and their determinants of food choices as well as the wider food supply system (e.g., providers of meal boxes) and their interactions.