Māori youth lead the way on creating eating and wellbeing guidelines

Guidelines for healthy eating and wellbeing need to resonate with their target audience, and a group of rangatahi Māori from Hawke’s Bay have shown how co-creation can produce high-quality guidelines for young people in Aotearoa New Zealand. 

In the latest Public Health Communication Centre Briefing, University of Auckland Professor Boyd Swinburn and co-author Professor David Tipene-Leach highlight two new studies that demonstrate the strengths of co-designing guidelines for young people with young people.

“The rangatahi group was amazing,” said Prof Boyd Swinburn. “They showed that through modern co-design processes, they could incorporate international evidence, te ao Māori concepts and peer feedback into guidelines for health and wellbeing, as well as develop highly effective communication campaigns for guidance.”

“With the Ministry of Health currently updating its guidelines for children and young people, policymakers should be taking note of these studies. 

This is high quality mahi, taking the best international guidelines and applying them to a New Zealand context.”

To develop these guidelines, the Nourishing Hawke’s Bay team partnered with 17 rangatahi Māori from four Hawke’s Bay secondary schools to create ten eating messages and ten wellbeing messages for all young people. The eating guidelines include messages on sustainable food choices and ultra-processed food. The wellbeing guidelines cover exercise, sleep, screen time, cyberbullying, and mutual respect. 

Following this, rangatahi created a dissemination campaign across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, recruiting Māori influencers, and filming content.

Their campaign achieved more than 1.48 million impressions and more than 19,000 engagement actions, at a total cost of NZ$125,000. Instagram engagement was 6.2% against an industry median of 0.36%. Cost per thousand TikTok impressions was NZ$0.09. This is comparable to or better than government campaigns with much larger budgets.

The studies were part of the Nourishing Hawke’s Bay: He wairua tō te kai project and describe the co-development and pilot dissemination of the Manaora Rangatahi Guidelines for Eating and Wellbeing.

“Nationally, nutrition, food security and mental health challenges for rangatahi are enormous, and healthy eating and wellbeing guidelines are foundational for communication and policy,” said Swinburn. 

“While 17 rangatahi from one region is not a national sample, the Manaora Rangatahi project shows that modern co-creation and dissemination methods for guidelines, including on challenging issues, can achieve very positive results.”