New Standards for Nutrition Science, Concepts and Methods—Low Socioeconomic Status and Overweight: Participatory Research Designs for the Development of Interventions

[Background]: The heavy burden of obesity on individuals and society has attracted a lot of attention, and many strategies to prevent or reverse it have been developed. Consequently, many reviews exist on this topic, However, similar to the bulk of studies, most reviews on combatting obesity follow the traditional (bio)medical approach. Dedicated interventions that take the unequal distribution of obesity among socioeconomic groups into account, particularly by applying an interdisciplinary approach that includes participation of the most heavily burdened low-SES groups themselves, are much more scarce and thus also less frequently reviewed.

[Objective]: We aim to write a scoping review on interventions or initiatives aiming at obesity among groups with low socioeconomic status that apply a form of participation of the target group. We will focus on community-based programmes.

[Methods]: We performed a literature search in Scopus, Web of Science and Pubmed. Using Rayyan software [1], we identified 3227 articles, of which, after screening the abstracts and full texts, 16 were eligible for further extraction of data.

[Results]: Currently, we are at the stage of data extraction. Preliminary findings show that participatory approaches have an effect on a range of outcomes in low-SES populations, including dietary patterns, sleep and/or BMI. Discussion: By confining the review to community-based participatory research, identifying causal relationships is not our main goal. Nevertheless, we will focus on interventions, initiatives or programmes that aim to generate an impact and therefore go beyond associations or identifications of underlying determinants. Instead, it may give us an understanding of why we tend to be ineffective in combatting obesity in low-SES populations with top-down approaches and possibly identify strategies that do have a long-term impact. At the conference, we will be able to present the final data and conclusions.

Peer reviewed