Effects and costs of The Healthy Primary School of the Future

OBJECTIVE To study school lifestyle interventions for elementary school children (The Healthy Primary School of the Future). RESEARCH QUESTION What are the effects of the introduction of increased physical activity with or without healthy nutrition on health behaviour and BMI of young children and what are the costs of this program? DESIGN Prospective controlled non-randomized study with nearly 1700 children in Parkstad (South-East Netherlands). RESULTS Preliminary results after two years show that the combination of increased physical activity and healthy nutrition result in a decreased BMIz-score (-0.036), increased physical activity alone in hardly any change (-0.10) while in the control group the BMIz-score increased (0.052). The net societal costs of the combination of physical activity and health nutrition costs were 1 euro per child per day. CONCLUSION The study contributes to the increasing amount of evidence proving that lifestyle interventions are effective in reducing the obesity epidemic. Future studies will show whether a weight reduction in children will result in the prevention of chronic disease later on in life and what the cost reduction related to this result will be.