Abstract:
The Healthier Lives He Oranga Hauora National Science Challenge is a national collaborative research programme funded by the New Zealand Government. Its vision is of an Aotearoa New Zealand with equitable health outcomes and a substantially reduced burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The Healthier Lives National Science Challenge Research Strategy 2019-2024 (Figure 1) proposed a new research area–healthy food and physical activity environments–aimed at scalable population-level interventions in order to meet the goal of improving equity of health outcomes as well as reducing the overall burden of disease arising from NCDs.
Theme 1 (Population Scale) of the Healthier Lives National Science Challenge’s Phase 2
examines how the world in which we live influences what we eat and how we move around,
in different settings and at different stages of life. It will also examine how we might target
food and physical activity systems to bring about a positive shift in health behaviours and
reduce the overall burden of NCDs in New Zealand, particularly related to obesity, diabetes
and cardiovascular disease. Research will focus on evaluating and modelling the impact of
population-level interventions and policy changes in relation to food and physical activity
environments with a view to establishing an evidence base for policy and practice decisionmaking.
In order to inform Theme 1, this stocktake was undertaken to synthesize major areas of
international research within the broad themes of ‘healthy food environments’ and ‘healthy
physical activity environments’, and provide a short summary of significant evidence within
each area, including research that may be currently underway in New Zealand.