Overlapping Risk Factors for Dietary Health Inequalities in Children and Young People

Why is the research needed?

Child overweight and obesity is a serious worldwide public health problem. In England in 2024/25, over one in ten children were living with obesity at age 4-5, and over 1 in 5 at ages 10-11; and obesity prevalence was over twice as high in the most deprived than in the least deprived areas. Childhood weight-related issues (including those for underweight children) are estimated to cost the NHS £340m per year. Today’s children become the future’s working age population, for which obesity and excess weight are currently estimated to cost £31bn per year in lost productivity.

Earlier work by ARC East of England researchers found that the most deprived areas also have the highest, and fastest growing, exposure to unhealthy food outlets such as hot food takeaways, and we explored the potential for planning regulations such as ‘exclusion zones’, which gave Local Authorities have the power to restrict new openings of these outlets, to improve health-related behaviours and outcomes. In this new project we aim to assemble a more holistic evidence base about a wider set of risk, and protective, factors, and how these overlap.

What are we doing?

We will bring together data on deprivation, retail and food environments; and on children and young people’s diets and health outcomes. We will identify places where several risk factors overlap with poor or unequal diets and health outcomes. We will initially use the Living Costs and Food Survey, Health Survey for England, National Diet and Nutrition Survey, and National Child Measurement Programme. We will work with other ARCs to support each other in accessing or compiling and cleaning data on children’s health outcomes, behaviours, and the environments they are exposed to.

How are we working with communities, services and organisations?

We have an advisory partnership to share methods and (publicly available) data sources with the Essex Affordable Food Network who have a ‘healthy food security’ project aiming to identify optimal places for their 'Community Supermarkets’; and intend to continue Knowledge Exchange with Local Authorities following the successful model of our previous project. We will develop plans for public involvement, engagement and participation and/or co-development of interventions once the scoping phase has identified risk and protective factors to focus on, and places with most serious overlapping risk factors have been identified.

What will the impact and benefits of this research be?

Our aim is to build the evidence base to support Local Authority, NHS and third-sector bodies target types and locations for interventions that will make the most difference. The cross-ARC networking in particular is intended to help address a key barrier to implementation of new or revised policies, which is a perceived need for ‘local evidence’, as well as enhancing research capacity regionally and nationally by improving researchers’ ability to work with the datasets best placed to provide robust evidence.

What do we have planned for knowledge mobilisation and implementation?

We do not yet have detailed plans for Knowledge Mobilisation and Implementation because the project is only in setup, scoping the data on risk and protective factors that can be assembled. We will have a better idea once we can identify the ‘policy owning’ bodies for each, such as lower tier local authorities for planning regulations, upper tier local authorities or combined authorities for transport or industrial/employment strategy, the Department for Work and Pensions for incomes and working hours for parents, or retailers for pricing. We anticipate convening Knowledge Exchange briefings with these stakeholders in a similar for to those with Local Authorities in earlier projects. The joint analysis framework will be co-produced with other ARCs and have benefit to researchers.

Related papers, outputs and resources

Outputs will be added when available