Quando promuovere stili di vita sani diventa un’esperienza professionale per gli adolescenti: il progetto ‘beFood’

Daily choices and personal preferences regarding food habits and physical activity are critical topics in health prevention. Health prevention is the first place for the implementation of public policies that aim at tackling obesity and physical inactivity that are some of the most relevant risk factors for chronic diseases, such as diabetes or complex mental diseases related to eating disorders. Generally, health promotion interventions are delivered in a top-down process with targets seen as passive receivers with a limited impact on their behaviors. Active communication processes are instead more effective to foster a learning path that lead to a behavioral change and stimulate people in taking on individual and collective responsibility towards health outcomes. ‘beFood’ is an action research project implemented in Tuscany as a new training and communication method with the aim of making adolescents receivers and messengers of the health contents. A group of Tuscan students (n = 49) from ten high school institutes was involved in this initiative as a part of their mandatory work-related learning pathway called Alternanza scuola-lavoro (a young apprenticeship program) from November 2016 to May 2017. The main objective of the project was to test the effectiveness of innovative strategies in promoting healthy lifestyles. In particular, the project aimed at shifting the participants’ role from passive receivers to active messengers by engaging them in the design phase and the conduction of a digital technology-based survey. They collected data on the habits and the preferences of their peers about food and physical activity by spreading a questionnaire including the healthy message to more than 5,000 respondents. During the whole process, it was possible to investigate the potential influence of peer-to-peer processes and the impact of customized languages and new technologies in spreading health promotional messages to the population target.