EU-funded 'afresh'-project looks at food and physical activity

Food and physical activity are looked at together in the EU-funded "afresh"-project. Eight regional clusters - strong in food and/or health - currently are setting up their joint future agenda aiming at the prevention of diet-and activity related deseases like obesity, diabetes, cardiovasculaire deseases, osteoporose, etc. Now, "afresh" came up with ca. 80 ideas for future research and innovative product or service ideas. Their focus: personalized diets and activity schemes, support for lifestyle changes, including a health-and activity encouriging environment at foodstores, workplaces, schools, transport modes and in leisure time.

A strong emphasis the project is posing on social maketing strategies to reach different focus groups via a customized and user-oriented communication. Given the evidence that most of the nutrition-related social campaigns in Europe were not sustainable in the last 20 years, more efforts are needed in target-group oriented food and lifestyle research as well as in customized social marketing.  The project also identified a knowledge gap in needs and demands, lacking knowledge in "health fostering" and "health damaging" behaviours of different population groups. The strategy exploration process within the "afresh" project therfore is stratified on   four main focus groups: children and teenagers, disadvanteged people, elderly population, employees health promotion at worksite.

Customized and personalized schemes for both, nutrition and physical activity, lie in the center of all "afresh" elaborations. To reach these goals more information, education and knowledge dissemination is required, including new ways of interactive e-tools, web-platforms, games, personal coaching and transparency measures. "Healthy choices " on the supply side in food stores, canteens and with catering have to be explicitly elaborated on, including regional-food strategies for fresh and convenient supply, reaching out to new forms of urban gardening and specific branding for children and teenagers. More research in biomakers and genotyping is regarded as useful in order to identify and classify consumer types. This will lead to better personalized offers entailing the defintion of time windows for interventions and for supporting sustainable lifestyle changes during the whole lifespan. A strong interest of the projects`parctipants lies in worksite health promotion. Here, indicators and standards will have to be developped including "healthy workplace indices" or "healthy city indices" for benchmarking and ranking. 

The group of elderly lacks knowledge and understanding of indiviual processes as well as differentiation of  typology of this population cohort. Biomarker research in order to understand the processes of ageing is seen necessary, development of age-related functional food and specific activity programmes, care and cure improvements will further be studied in the project. Affordable novel food development for disadvanteged people was discussed during seminars as well as affordable food distribution and specific strategies to avoid their sedentary lifestyles. After having set-up a Joint Research Agenda, the "afresh" project will specify its priorities in concrete research project ideas and innovative product-and service concepts. "afresh" will publish its agenda by the end of this year.