Communicating evidence about the environment’s role in obesity and support for government policies to tackle obesity: a systematic review with meta-analysis

Abstract

Public support for many policies that tackle obesity by changing environments is low. This may reflect commonly held causal beliefs about obesity, namely that it is due to failures of self-control rather than environmental influences. Several studies have sought to increase public support by changing these and similar causal beliefs, with mixed results. The current review is the first systematic synthesis of these studies. Searches of PsycInfo, Medline, Web of Science, Scopus, and Open Grey yielded 20 eligible studies (N = 8977) from 11,776 abstracts. Eligible studies were controlled experiments with an intervention group that communicated information about the environment’s role in obesity, and a measure of support for environment-based obesity policies. The protocol was prospectively registered on PROSPERO. Meta-analyses showed no evidence that communicating information about the environment’s influence on obesity changed policy support or the belief that the environment influences obesity. A likely explanation for this null effect is the ineffectiveness of interventions that were designed to change the belief that the environment influences obesity. The possibility remains, however, that the association observed between beliefs about the causes of obesity and attitudes towards obesity policies is correlational and not causal.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2020.1829980
Divisions: College of Health & Life Sciences > School of Psychology
College of Health & Life Sciences > Aston Institute of Health & Neurodevelopment (AIHN)
Additional Information: © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Funding: This report is independent research commissioned and funded by the National Institute for Health Research Policy Research Programme (Policy Research Unit in Behaviour and Health [grant number PR-UN-0409-10109]).
Uncontrolled Keywords: Causal beliefs,attitudes,attribution,obesity,policy,Clinical Psychology,Psychiatry and Mental health
Publication ISSN: 1743-7202
Last Modified: 18 Mar 2024 08:38
Date Deposited: 30 Mar 2022 12:43
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://www.tan ... 99.2020.1829980 (Publisher URL)
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Review article
Published Date: 2022-01-02
Published Online Date: 2020-10-02
Accepted Date: 2020-09-10
Authors: Reynolds, James (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-1536-1557)
Vasiljevic, Milica
Pilling, Mark
Marteau, Theresa M.

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