Source: Radio New Zealand
Rangatahi from Hawkes Bay filming a social media campaign to promote their healthy eating guidelines. Supplied/Eastern Institute of Technology
A group of Hawke’s Bay rangatahi have developed their own set of guidelines for healthy eating and backed it up by creating and starring in a social-media campaign to disseminate the guidelines.
Two studies have been published describing the creation of and campaign promoting the Manaora Rangatahi Guidelines for Eating and Wellbeing, as well as demonstrating the strengths of co-designing guidelines for young people with young people.
Professor of population nutrition and global health at the University of Auckland Boyd Swinburn told RNZ healthy eating guidelines for children and young people, which were developed in 2012 and last updated in 2015, are in the process of being updated by the Ministry of Health.
“Eating guidelines they seem like they have like an educational role, that they are helping people to guide them to what’s healthy to eat and what’s not and that is true, but they are also quite powerful policy instruments.
“So once you have a set of agreed eating guidelines that flows on into things like… the school lunches program, what’s able to be advertised, what’s able to have health claims and so on.”
The studies were part of the Nourishing Hawke’s Bay: He wairua tō te kai project and Swinburn said he and co-author professor David Tipene-Leach felt the current guidelines were pretty old, formal and didn’t resonate with young people.
He believes that co-design is the way the go, with rangatahi providing their input and experiences with the support of experts who provide the scientific knowledge.
“When it comes to converting them into messages that are going to be picked up and understood and thought about by the target group you have to involve those people to whom you’re targeting it just doesn’t make sense any other way.”
Seventeen rangatahi from four schools in Hawke’s Bay took part took part in three noho marae (marae stays) developing draft guidelines and comparing them against other guidelines from New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Norway and USA.
“They critically appraised these different guidelines based on what seemed relevant to them, they were quite taken with the Mexican guidelines actually because the Mexican guidelines had an invitational approach,” Swinburn said.
After the first noho marae the draft guidelines were put to the test during the next school term with students gathering feedback from their friends and fellow students, he said.
“It wasn’t only eating guidelines, we started out with eating guidelines but they wanted to have wellbeing guidelines which included sleep and physical activity and cyber safety and all that sort of thing, so this expanded into 10 eating guidelines and 10 wellbeing guidelines.
Rangatahi from Hawkes Bay taking part in a noho marae to develop the Manaora Rangatahi Guidelines for Eating and Wellbeing. Supplied/Eastern Institute of Technology
“Our first goal was to try to get some guidelines together and when they came together and when we tested them and tweaked them we were thinking these are fantastic, these are way better than any others that we’ve seen.
“I was totally enthused by these guidelines because they were rich and they had Māori constructs in which were holistic and anyway I thought they were beautiful and I thought okay we’ve got to get these out there we can’t just do these and put them on the shelf.”
Swinburn said the students took the lead on the social media campaign, guiding the researchers on how to share the information, how it would look and which Māori influencers they wanted to work with.
“[The rangatahi] put in a huge amount of their own knowledge and expertise and understanding of their peer group to be able to say ‘this is what’s going to resonate, this is what’s going to have an effect, no that won’t work, that’s useless, they don’t understand that’ and so they were really quite clear about what the ways to disseminate these guidelines were.”
Their campaign achieved more than 1.48 million impressions and more than 19,000 engagement actions, at a total cost of NZ$125,000.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand