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WM Change 4 Life Network

What is Change4Life?

Change4Life is an initiative, supported by the Department of Health, bringing together health and education professionals, industry and voluntary organisations with the shared aims to improve children’s diets and levels of activity so reducing the threat to their future health.

Change4Life is part of a coalition for health movement made up of national and regional partners as well as the media, big businesses and community organisations.

Why do we need Change4Life?

Obesity is a major public health issue, with over a third of children in England are currently or overweight or obese according to recent reports.

Research* also shows that people will only change their behaviours if they believe that everyone around them is changing too. If families are to change their behaviours around diet and activity they will need support from those they trust: doctors, schools, supermarkets, the institutions and the brands they trust.

Change4Life aims to inspire a society-wide movement for behaviour changes in diet and activity in the long-term. The early stages of Change4Life focus on targeting families with young children (aged 0-11). Change4Life will reposition the issue of obesity, highlighting to parents the links between poor diet and sedentary behaviour and preventable illnesses and their responsibility to ensure that children eat better and take regular exercise. This approach is based on a number of key insights around attitudes and behaviours to diet and activity shown by ongoing academic and consumer research*.

* This research is available online through the Department of Health website – search for The ‘Healthy Living’ Social Marketing Initiative: A Review of the Evidence and the Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives Strategy, as well as the Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives: Consumer Insight Research

Why is Change4Life working with commercial companies?

Change4Life takes a whole society approach to help influence and shift behaviours around diet and physical activity. Many organisations have influence with and can reach our target audiences in ways that the DH and NHS cannot.

We will do this by tapping into the power of brand loyalties – working to make changes in food manufacturing, shopping habits, supporting new activity schemes and spreading the word in the press, TV and radio.

Any commercial company wanting to work with us on the Chang4Life movement must sign up to our Terms of Engagement. The Terms of Engagement ask companies to commit to working with us on both healthy diet and physical activity initiatives that complement and support the Change4Life objectives.

The Department of Health will be spending around £75 million on the Change4Life movement over three years. The commercial sector spends about £335 million each year on promoting foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt. We need to work with commercial companies and influence their corporate social responsibility agendas.

What do we want people to do?

We want parents and children to eat better and move more. We need to influence them to increase their behaviours around food and physical activity.

The behaviours we are asking people to change – how they shop, how they cook, how they eat, how they travel, how they play – are not easy. Some of them are hard to do once; all of them are hard to change for life. They’ll need incentives to change and sustained support as they try to make those changes part of their lives.

Resources are available to the public through the Department of Health website such as a dedicated helpline number 0300 1234567, information packs and other useful resources as the Change4Life movement over the three years from January 2009.

What Change4Life resources are available to me as a health care professional?

Most of the resources are available to download from the Department of Health website: www.dh.gov.uk/change4life. Other resources can be ordered from Prolog.

A set of Change4Life Principles and Guidelines for Government and the NHS is also available on this website. These include instructions on the use of the main Change4Life logo, fonts, sub-brands (such as walk4life, swim4life) and the potential of creating a sub-brand for your own healthy living initiative.