New review highlights how adolescents are shaping healthy food environments
A new scoping review published in Obesity Reviews explores how adolescents are participating in efforts to transform food environments to support healthier diets.
The review highlights the various ways young people engage in advocacy, co-design, and action - and identifies how future initiatives can better support meaningful youth involvement.
Led by researchers from the University of Sydney in collaboration with the Health Advisory Panel for Youth at the University of Sydney (HAPYUS), the study identifies 89 peer-reviewed articles from across 31 countries, offering a global snapshot of adolescent engagement in food environment transformation.
What the review found
The review identified a range of adolescent-led or adolescent-engaged activities aiming to improve the healthiness of food environments in settings such as schools, communities, and digital platforms. These included:
- Co-design and consultation: Adolescents contributed to the development of school food policies, educational resources, and local food programmes.
- Advocacy and activism: Some studies described adolescents campaigning for change through peer leadership, public messaging, or civic engagement.
- Digital participation: Young people also used social media and digital platforms to share health messages or influence food choices.
Despite these examples, the review found that adolescent involvement often remained limited in scope, with adults retaining control over decision-making processes. Participation was more commonly tokenistic than transformative.
Barriers and opportunities
The review highlights several challenges to deeper adolescent engagement:
- Power imbalances between adults and adolescents
- Lack of training and resources for young participants
- Unclear expectations or insufficient follow-through on youth input
However, it also identifies opportunities to improve practice, including:
- Embedding participation in long-term partnerships
- Providing capacity building and recognition
- Ensuring that adolescents help define the goals and outcomes of interventions
Recommendations for future research
Informed by the perspectives of adolescent co-researchers, the review concludes with a set of recommendations to strengthen youth engagement in future research and action. These include prioritising co-designed studies, embedding long-term partnerships with adolescents, and ensuring youth are supported to lead change rather than simply consulted. The authors highlight the importance of addressing power dynamics, building capacity, and creating accountability mechanisms that reflect adolescents' lived experiences and aspirations. These insights serve as a guide for researchers and practitioners seeking to meaningfully involve young people in transforming food environments.
Moving towards transformative participation
The authors argue that transformative adolescent participation—where young people are recognised as equal contributors with lived experience—is essential for equitable and effective food systems change. They call for future research and practice to move beyond consultation and towards shared decision-making and leadership.
This review provides a valuable foundation for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners looking to integrate youth voices into food and health policy design—particularly in light of growing calls for inclusive, intergenerational approaches to food systems transformation.
Our Journals
World Obesity publishes four scientific, peer-reviewed journals, each focusing on a different area of obesity research: systematic reviews, pediatrics, clinical treatment, and science and practice.
FIND OUT MORE