ENERGY · EuropeaN Energy balance Research to prevent excessive weight Gain among Youth

Objective: The ENERGY proposal addresses HEALTH-2007-3.3-1: Promoting healthy behaviour in children and adolescents. It will be specifically focussed on promoting health behaviours that contribute to prevention of overweight and obesity among children and adolescents. Strategy: The project will use a multidisciplinary analysis of determinants and intervention schemes on extrinsic and intrinsic factors determining specific nutrition and physical activity behaviours in children and adolescents in different populations and regions. This in order to develop an evidence and theory-based new scheme to prevent unnecessary weight gain among youth in transition from childhood to adolescence. The new intervention scheme will be school-based and family-involved, thus combining a key intervention setting (schools) with a key behavioural determining environment (family). This new scheme will be validated for improved capacity to encourage and sustain healthful eating and physical activity behaviours, and the results will be disseminated among key stakeholders including researchers, policy makers and the general population. Methods: In 10 work packages systematic reviews, secondary analyses of existing and accessible data sets, focus group research, survey and community-trial evaluation research among schoolchildren, parents and school staff will be conducted according to state-of-the art methodology guided by an established and approved research quality handbook. Consortium: The ENERGY project consortium spans the necessary multidisciplinary variety of experts such as public health experts, epidemiologists, nutritionists, physical activity experts, health promotion experts, paediatricians, psychologists, economists, totalling 14 partners, from 11 countries representing all regions of Europe. The consortium has ample experience in conducting and coordinating multi-centre international research as well as international dissemination to all relevant stakeholders.