By Samantha Elliott

The scholarship program commenced in 1993 and is a collaboration between the Australian Health Promotion Association (AHPA) and Healthway. Each year, four 12-month scholarships are awarded, providing recipients with a paid work placement to deliver a health promotion project.

The scholarship enables scholars to be embedded within an organisation like every other team member, while also receiving mentorship from an external professional and access to a professional development budget. These assets are designed to invest in and strengthen the future health promotion workforce.

I was fortunate enough to be part of this incredible program, working alongside the freshSNAP team and the National Nutrition Foundation.

The primary goal of my project was to create a co-designed resource that improves the knowledge and confidence of adolescents aged 12-18 years in making nutritious food and drink choices. At the beginning of the scholarship, there wasn’t an exact resource identified as this was to be based on current literature and the outcomes from the stakeholder interviews and youth focus groups.

I spoke with 12 stakeholders from different industries (nutrition, health, teachers, parents, etc) who worked directly and indirectly with adolescents and gave their insights around what the best ways were to collaborate with them.

A clear theme was where adolescents are getting their nutrition information. The top places adolescents were going for nutrition information were their families, search engines and AI and social media. Most notably, families came in as the top source for a lot of them, which then shows how even though being in a large digital age, it is just as important for parents and carers to modelling positive food behaviours and advice. But on the other hand, social media was obviously still a big factor for adolescents, particularly around following influencers for ‘what I eat in a day’s’ and the more aesthetic side of what they individually deem to be “healthy”.

There is a big perception with healthy foods being deemed as more expensive, and cost and affordability being a big barrier to them eating nutritious foods. As well as this, them also having to rely on their families to purchase their food with a lot of them not having jobs was a big theme coming through. Additionally, a few of the participants were involved in a lot of extracurricular activities which resulted in them not having a lot of time to prepare meals, and more focused on snacks and meals they can have on the go.

When asked to imagine creating a nutrition resource specifically for their school, participants suggested a variety of ideas. Common themes included:

• Having affordable, healthy foods available at the canteen
• More hands-on cooking experiences that would be useful after school
• Engaging and evidence-based digital tools
• Personalized guidance on topics such as fueling for energy and exercise

From what we identified through the thematic analysis, I decided that an adolescent e-book/guide would be the best way to present the resources and information gathered through the project. The e-book firstly goes into detail around the purpose and how it has been created through the AHPA scholarship program, as well as then explaining why consistent nutrition messaging matters, particularly for adolescents.

5 topics are then covered that directly align with what the adolescents identified as being their biggest down falls or confusions when it came to nutrition education. These include: