Prevention of Eating Habits Associated With Obesity in Adolescents Through a Wise Intervention

Obesity in adolescence is associated with physical and mental health problems and predicts obesity in adulthood. Adolescence may be an ideal time to target interventions, as this is when numerous health-related habits are consolidated. Several universal preventive interventions have been carried out in educational centers for the promotion of healthy eating habits. However, the results of reviews and meta-analyses have concluded that most are not cost-effective for producing long-term changes in the dietary preferences of young people. The so-called wise interventions paradigm is an innovative approach to interventions that involve a set of rigorous techniques grounded in research to help people improve in a variety of life settings. Recently, it has been developed a wise intervention aimed at improving adolescents' daily dietary choices. This intervention, called the values alignment intervention, focused on the role of marketing on the behavior of children and adolescents who are exposed to a relentless barrage of marketing from the food industry. The values alignment intervention seeks to neutralize the positive emotional associations with junk food that marketing generates and presents the rejection of unhealthy foods in favor of healthy alternatives as a way to live up to two values that are important to adolescents: (1) the desire to be autonomous from adult control, and (2) the desire for social justice. In two randomized controlled trials, it has been demonstrated that the intervention reduced implicit positive associations with junk food and substantially improved dietary choices, especially in boys. In addition, there were significant differences in attitudinal variables related to healthy eating. These promising results suggest that reframing unhealthy eating as incompatible with important youth values could be a low-cost solution to produce changes in adolescent attitudes and dietary choices. Therefore, the general objective of this project is to adapt the values alignment intervention to improve obesity-related eating habits in Spanish adolescents and evaluates its effectiveness. It is therefore a highly innovative project with great potential for social impact in the field of health promotion.