Driving Healthy Futures project
Driving Healthy Futures project
Food Stories (formerly Driving Healthy Futures)
Food Stories, formerly known as the Driving Healthy Futures project, was a two-year programme funded by Enterprise Rent-A-Car in 2022. Phase 1 started as a UK-wide opportunity for 100 Barnardo’s as the Driving Healthy Futures project to take part in workshops on food nutrition and cooking skills, including training on how to run your own cooking workshops with resources for practitioners to use in the community. Healthy eating | Barnardo’s Family Space
In phase 2, Barnardo’s SEEN took on the programme, due to our expertise in system thinking and structural inequalities and expanded the format of the programme to include UK-wide roadshows.
Alongside providing practical skills and knowledge around healthy eating, and inspired by the communities we worked with in phase 1, Barnardo’s SEEN intentionally built its knowledge base by talking to those directly affected by the systems surrounding healthy eating. Barnardo’s SEEN sought to explore the difficulties and barriers that people face to healthy eating through a system-thinking lens.
People of African, Asian and Caribbean heritage are more likely than people of White European heritage to report limiting long-term illness and poor health outcomes. This is a manifestation of the impact related to health inequity which is why we have chosen this as a priority area.
Barnardo’s SEEN is working to address this problem through the lens of food and access to nutritionally balanced diets. Poor diet impacts not only our physical health but our emotional wellbeing, therefore it is a strong leverage point in achieving health equity.
Dietary norms in the UK are impacting the health opportunities, outcomes and life chances of children and young people.
Research shows that food and dietary-related illness is leading to a health crisis, with 22% of 10–11-year-olds experiencing obesity and a further 14% being overweight in 2022/23 (NHS England 2023). Being affected by obesity can increase the risk of other health conditions, such as type 2 diabetes. For example, in the UK the number of children and young people with type 2 diabetes is rising, with 2,000 who have been diagnosed currently attending specialist NHS clinics, a rise of almost 13% from last year and a 20% increase from when recording began (NHS Digital 2023).
Children and families are not only impacted by the health outcomes associated with the over-consumption of unhealthy food. It is estimated that 14% of people across the UK have experienced food insecurity in 2021/22 (The Trussell Trust, 2023) and in 2022 alone, there were 800,000 admissions to hospital for conditions related to malnutrition (The Guardian 2023). It isn’t just our physical health that is at risk with research showing that diets that are high in processed foods, sugar and salt have been linked to emotional and behavioural difficulties in young people such as anxiety and depression (Jacka, F.N. et al 2011).
Negative health outcomes are disproportionately experienced by children in the most deprived fifth of the population, who are twice as likely to be living with obesity than those in the least deprived fifth (NHS Digital 2023). Children of African, Asian, and Caribbean heritage are more likely to live in the 10% of most deprived neighbourhoods in the UK, therefore it is more likely that they could be disproportionality impacted by poor healthy eating outcomes. For example, people of Pakistani heritage were the most likely to live in the 10% of neighbourhoods most deprived in relation to health and disability (Gov.UK 2020). These disproportionate experiences are often named ‘health inequalities’.
Key Learning
Of the over 1000 children and young people and 300 parents and carers we spoke to, along with the contributions of 51 community partners, it was clear that most people would like to eat healthier. Despite this, there are significant barriers stopping these families and individuals from starting or continuing their journeys to pursue a healthier lifestyle.
Driving Healthy Futures project | SEEN Barnardo’s (youtube.com)
The insights gathered in our Fuelling Food Equity report are only the start of a wider conversation to be had around the structural inequalities that prevent us from eating healthier meals, and how we reconnect children, young people and their communities to local food systems to promote better health outcomes.
Our findings are first and foremost a community voice report. It shares insights from conversations held in 7 key locations in the UK on what barriers to maintaining healthy diets are of greatest concern to the children, young people, families, and the communities we spoke with. In addition, the report contextualises the findings from those we spoke to with the work of SEEN, and the existing research in the field, to highlight the structural factors that can drive the inequalities that people told us about.
What did we find?
The children, young people, families and community partners shared their experiences and challenges in eating a healthy diet. There was a clear understanding from most of the participants of what constitutes healthy eating, challenging the prevailing notions of the need for greater education in making personal choices. Many pointed to several factors which made healthy choices difficult. These included:
- The cost of buying ingredients and fuel costs
- The time it takes to cook and the move to more convenient solutions
- Mixed messaging making knowing what food is healthy challenging
- Food habits/ conditioning that suggest healthy recipes wouldn’t include food they would normally eat
- Access to healthy recipes
- Local availability of healthy ingredients
- Availability of a good range of different and diverse ingredients
Everywhere you go in the supermarket, there’s usually processed sugary foods. They’re the things they want, that’s what they’re being exposed to the most. And the healthy stuff doesn’t look as appetizing as all the stuff in shiny packets and stuff…
– Parent/carer, Stirling
I think there should be legislation or something where they’re not able to have all of that stuff at children’s eyelines and kind of they’re teasing them all the time ’cause then that’s what they focus on and you’re trying to get them to come home and have dinner but all they wanna have is a pack of sweets they saw in the shop and they don’t wanna talk about dinner. They just want the sweets.
We were informed that people from African, Asian and Caribbean backgrounds can sometimes feel excluded from conversations on healthy eating as current nutritional and healthy eating guideline lack cultural context and relevance. Studies show that people of African, Asian, and Caribbean heritage increasingly feel that current diet and health messages are not culturally responsive and target a White European audience (Ojo, et al., 2023).
This leads to a general mistrust in UK dietary advice. An example of Eurocentric bias in our dietary information can be found in the Eatwell (NHS, 2022). This is based on a very narrow selection of foods believed to form the ‘typical’ diet in the UK. Other culturally relevant versions of the Eatwell Guide have been produced but these have been published independently of the UK government, which make them harder to promote (Food Matters, 2023). This could further marginalise different dietary perspectives.
So, one of the things that we come through to us is that certain spaces are not welcoming. And, and this is why
– Communities Engage and Thrive, Community Partner
I talked about having recipes that show replacements, and locally sourced replacements cause actually when you go into certain spaces and you might want to eat healthy, but actually you don’t know what to do with that food . . . Now if we know what to do with it, we know that there’s a food producer locally that does that and I know how to use it, I’m more likely to go in there and get involved. But if I have no knowledge of that, I stick to what I know and that could be limited in certain instances by access”
Taking action
A food system that produces the current levels of inequity seen in our Driving Healthy Futures roadshows is not serving everyone that lives in the UK and is setting future generations up to fail. Action is urgently needed to reverse the current trends. Existing solutions, such as the Better Health programme, overwhelmingly focus on behaviour change, assuming that bad decisions are the crux of the issue. While there was some recognition that personal choice was one factor contributing to poor diet, it was also communicated that choice is constrained within wider systemic barriers.
The Driving Healthy Futures programme has been the first step in this process of creating a transformative vision where we sought to listen, understand, and appreciate the limitations that exist for children, young people, families, and communities in accessing healthy diets. We have done this in recognition that it will be children and young people who inherit our current food system, it will be their opportunities that are impacted and therefore it is our ethical duty to start addressing these big questions now. We have designed a toolkit to support the wider food system in having these conversations and asking the big questions (Conversation on Change Toolkit)
Responding to need
The food system in the UK is vast and barriers to food equity are therefore multifaceted and complex. To start addressing the root causes of food inequity, our next phase of Food Stories intends to target multiple aspects of the problem with a holistic approach. To this end, we have designed this programme as a series of complimentary workstreams, breaking our previous reliance on one definitive ‘solution’ which will only have the capacity to superficially address systemic concerns. The workstreams are based on feedback we have received from children, young people, families, and community partners about opportunities for change and seek to empower them to make changes to their food systems.
Let’s work together
At SEEN, we pride ourselves on the work we do, and are striving to achieve our aims of creating a society where children and young people of African, Asian and Caribbean heritage have equitable futures – working with our partners to deliver these solutions. If you are interested in working with us on this, please get in touch below.
