Spotlight on nutrition and physical activity at conference

Spotlight on nutrition and physical activity at national conference

7 May 2013

New Zealand and Australian nutrition and physical activity experts are in Rotorua to discuss the linked public health challenges of improving our food supply and getting New Zealanders up and moving.

Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, science advisor to the Prime Minister, Associate Professor Rachael Taylor, University of Otago, and Dr Teuila Percival, Auckland University, will each provide keynote opening addresses to the conference.

The conference, with the theme “It Starts With Us: Ma Mātau E Timata”, is hosted by Agencies for Nutrition Action (ANA), a national body committed to improving nutrition and physical activity in Aotearoa. It is being held on 8 and 9 May 2013.

Other keynote speakers include leading Australian academic and social nutritionist Associate Professor Danielle Gallegos, and Australian physical activity and public health expert Professor Adrian Bauman.

Professor Sir Peter Gluckman will speak on the implications of what parents eat, on their children’s health. Professor Sir Peter, one of New Zealand’s best-known scientists, is science advisor to the Prime Minister and founding director of the Auckland-based Liggins Institute.

Associate Professor Taylor will tell the conference that learning to feed infants differently may help ensure fewer of them become overweight or obese.

“Children learn pretty early that food is a great way to control their parents. As a parent myself, I know this is where many of the biggest battles play out in households.” she says.

She will discuss how approaching food differently could prevent and manage a problem affecting as many as a third of Kiwi preschoolers.

“Studies show some parents adopt coercive behaviours when feeding their kids. They use it to reward good behaviour or take it away as a punishment,” she says.

“In this way, parents might be inadvertently using feeding practices that impair a child’s ability to manage food.”

Paediatrician Dr Teuila Percival will discuss the increasing levels of obesity and obesity-related diseases being experienced by Pacific peoples in New Zealand – both adults and children.

She will tell the conference that Pacific community-based programmes developed in New Zealand and involving churches, extended family and primary healthcare services have shown promise and note that much can be adapted and learnt from New Zealand’s experience in community based obesity prevention and non-communicable disease treatment.

“For both New Zealand and the region, there is a need to develop effective national, community and family based strategies and programmes that will address the increasing food and nutrition challenges of our Pacific people.

“This will require not just public health and health services but whole community, multi-sector approaches that are informed by and are appropriate for the Pacific context with consideration of Pacific lived realities both in New Zealand and the wider Pacific Islands region.”

Other keynote speakers include leading Australian academic and social nutritionist Associate Professor Danielle Gallegos speaking on food literacy, Australian physical activity and public health expert Professor Adrian Bauman discussing why physical activity is the ‘Cinderella’ of risk factors, and Professor Boyd Swinburn speaking on the future for obesity prevention in New Zealand with a focus on ‘Who could we follow and where could we lead?’.

• Professor Sir Peter Gluckman was the founding Director of the Liggins Institute in Auckland and is one of New Zealand’s best known scientists. His research has won him numerous awards and international recognition including Fellowship of the Commonwealth’s most prestigious scientific organisation, The Royal Society (London). He is the only New Zealander elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science (USA) and the Academy of Medical Sciences of Great Britain. In 2009 he became a Knight of the New Zealand Order of Merit replacing the 2008 Distinguished Companion of the NZ Order of Merit, for services to medicine and having previously been made a Companion of the Order in 1997. In 2001 he received New Zealand’s top science award, the Rutherford Medal, and in July 2009 he was appointed as the first Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand.

• Dr Teuila Percival is Consultant Paediatrician at KidzFirst Children’s Hospital in South Auckland and a senior lecturer and Director of the Pacific Health Section at the School of Population Health, University of Auckland. Her particular interests are in Pacific peoples’ health, maternal and child health, child abuse and community paediatrics.

• Associate Professor Rachael Taylor is researcher at the Edgar National Centre for Diabetes and Obesity Research, University of Otago. She became the inaugural Karitane Fellow in Early Childhood Obesity following a successful Leading Thinkers campaign. Her work centres around developing effective solutions for the prevention and management of childhood overweight from birth to adolescence.

ENDS

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