Obesity and health care interventions: Substantiating a multi‐modal challenge through the lens of grounded theory

Abstract

Issue addressed: One of the biggest concerns for human health in the 21st century is the ever-increasing rate of obesity and its associated budgetary implications for publicly funded health care service provisioning. This study at the outset explores the multifaceted nature of food-related consumption choices and outcomes of obesity, and later offers suggestions to improve the existing interventional strategies to curtail the epidemic. Methods: A total of 24 participants were recruited through poster invitations placed around the greater metropolitan area of Auckland, New Zealand. Participants shared their health care intervention program experiences through in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed in keeping with traditions of constructivist grounded theory. Findings: Analysis revealed various concurrent individually acting and ecologically mediated processes which led to obesogenic outcomes as a result of social actors' (participants) engagement in acts of (food-related) consumption practices. Conclusions: This study helps to illustrate the underlying, multifaceted processes that lead to obese individuals feeling defeated or disempowered and categorically willing, yet unable to bring about healthy changes in their lives. We hope this study will prompt health care practitioners to take a holistic approach while conceiving and deploying health care intervention programs. So what?: Current health care interventional programs are not achieving optimum solutions for those in need. All future programs need to acknowledge the roles played by an individual, as well as ecological factors, while deploying client-centric intervention solutions. Perhaps these programs are in need of a team-based approach to offer a truly "wrap-around" service provisioning strategy, rather than the traditional oneon-one consultative approaches in use at current times.

Occupational health check-ups and health-promoting programs and asthma

“…Further, obese working-aged individuals were adviced almost three times more often to change their health behavior and participated 1.5 times more often in health-promoting programs such as smoking cessation and weight-loss program which also reflects the number of given interventions. In a study of New Zealand, it was also found that current health care interventional programs are not effective enough in means of reducing obesity and that new and broader perspectives should be encouraged if positive results were expected [14]. Contrarily, implementing health promotion programs has been suggested to reduce healthcare costs by employees with high blood glucose, obesity, stress, depression, and physical inactivity [15].…”

The Association between Grazing and Food Addiction: The Italian Version of the Repetitive Eating Questionnaire (Rep(Eat)-Q) and Its Relationships with Food Addiction Criteria

“…Obesity is a multifactorial chronic disease influenced by various biological factors (e.g., genetic, medical), psychological factors, and situational factors that contribute to Nutrients 2024, 16, 949 2 of 18 its development and persistence [1,5,[7][8][9]. One potentially crucial aspect implicated in the development and persistence of obesity is the idea that certain foods may trigger a dependency response in some individuals [10][11][12]-namely, food addiction (FA).…”

Healthy Snacks: Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Traditional Food Brand Corporate Storytelling

“…Following the conclusion of the COVID-19 period, the most significant thing that will be on the post-COVID-19 agenda in many countries across the world is to work toward improving the people's diets and, as a result of this, the health of such populations. It is regarded as how one can live a healthy lifestyle and tackle the ever-increasing problem of being overweight and obese (Gaur et al, 2020;Kliment et al, 2021;Mandlik et al, 2021) . According to the research conducted in the past, this may be accomplished by placing individual responsibility for one's health care (Martindale et al, 2020;Király et al, 2020;Overgaauw et al, 2020).…”