Interventions for Healthy Lifestyles
One of the challenges our society is facing today is reducing the burden of chronic diseases. Chronic diseases are often the result of modifiable lifestyle behaviours, such as the quantity and quality of food consumption, which often impact environmental sustainability as well.
One way to promote human health and prevent disease, while taking into account sustainability considerations, is by positively changing people's lifestyle behaviour through intervention. Changing people's lifestyle behaviours is often difficult, however, because these behaviours are determined by many factors such as the physical and social environment, personal learning history, knowledge and skills, and motivation, and these factors may interact and can be different for different target groups.
Within the Consumption and Healthy Lifestyles Group, we acknowledge this complexity, meaning that we adapt the interventions to people within their specific context. We refine and improve on state-of-the-art approaches to behaviour change, and go beyond such approaches by examining new ways of promoting durable adoption of health behaviours.
As no situation is the same, we investigate different groups and settings, ranging from healthy individuals to patients, from young age to old age, with various (social economic) backgrounds, and from at home to schools to the workplace. Our interventions are theory-driven and contribute to the refinement of theories by developing a better understanding. CHL strives to design, implement, and evaluate interventions in cooperation with stakeholders inside and outside of academia, such as nurses, dietitians, neighbourhood sport coaches, physiotherapists, game developers, lifestyle coaches and doctors. Methods such as participatory action research or co-design/co-creation help us in designing interventions with the target group.
