Soft drink consumption among young people
Of Amsterdam’s young people, nearly 1 in 4 is overweight. Being overweight increases the chances of developing diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and has a major impact on mental health. Soft drink consumption is one of the main causes of overweight and obesity due to the large amount of sugars. In addition, it is unhealthy because it has no nutritional value. How do we reduce its frequent consumption? How do we make young people and their parents aware of the negative consequences of drinking excessively sweetened beverages?
Crucial in the approach
Connecting to the living world
Three times a day Cola and then some juice. Young people think drinking soft drinks is quite normal. We interviewed nearly 40 young people from underprivileged neighborhoods in Amsterdam about their views on soda and their soda consumption. And this is encouraged everywhere they go. It is present at home, parents drink it, you can get it at school, you can easily walk to the supermarket to get it and you see it everywhere on social media. It’s pretty disturbing that soda is so ingrained in young people’s lives. That it is so incredibly normal. It’s cheap and in young people’s experience, drinking soda has no noticeable impact on their health.
But soft drinks are a major contributor to obesity. And obesity in children and adolescents can have major negative long-term consequences. This also appears to be the conclusion nationwide. For 7 in 10 Dutch adolescents, drinking soft drinks is quite normal. A large part even drinks it daily. And for 65% of young people it is present at home. There is a lot of attention in the media and questions are being asked in Parliament about it. KRO-NCRV made an interesting broadcast about it ‘The bitter taste of sweet drinks‘.
To connect this research to the world of young people, we used digital challenges via a smart phone. The challenges were small doing tasks, approachable and fun to answer. We also used vlogs and interviewed young people in pairs. The insights will be used in the sugar tax lobby and as a starting point for designing policy on this. The project recently led to parliamentary questions.
