Boris Johnson’s plan to tackle obesity must be backed by behavioural science
The last 12 months have revealed clear links between obesity and Covid-19. As the Government pledges £100m to tackle this next great health challenge, what will it take to reduce our national waistline for life – not just life after lockdown?
This month, the Government unveiled a new incentives and rewards approach designed to tackle the obesity crisis. It has the potential to be the prescription that’s so desperately needed.
Dispensing it successfully requires us to understand the psychology behind how we encourage people to form new healthy habits for life – beyond the period of resolution setting that will inevitably mark the start of this next chapter.
One of the many tragedies of the pandemic is that it’s showed just how much further we need to go to reduce the burden of obesity on individuals and on society. It is estimated that more than six in ten adults in the UK are overweight or obese. We now know, this makes them twice as likely to be hospitalised if they test positive for the virus.
At the same time, another, more positive trend has emerged in the role physical activity plays in reducing these risks. In the data we’ve observed among Vitality’s 1.3m members last year, those who participated in regular exercise had a 28 per cent reduced risk of admission to hospital from Covid-19.
So, we have to ask, why as a nation are we struggling to shift the scales in the right direction when evidence of the benefits of a fitter and healthier lifestyle are so clear?
Apart from government, insurance is the only sector that can tangibly monetise improved health outcomes. Where most insurance models fail to account for change in insurance risk over time as a result of people’s lifestyle choices, the Vitality business model uses behavioural science to make people healthier while simultaneously offering savings on the price of insurance.
The outcome of this is what we call shared value. When we help people to live more active lives, they are healthier and happier. This means we prosper as a business, because fewer people make claims enabling us to reinvest in more incentives for them, and therefore wider society benefits because healthier people make fewer claims on state run services.
Affecting long lasting change in behaviour is vital if we are to tackle obesity. Many factors influence the disease, including a person’s environment and genetics, but behaviours that are deeply ingrained and automatic also play a significant role.
Often, intervention efforts assume that people will be motivated to modify their behaviour if they understand the costs posed by their unhealthy habits. Yet we know people are reluctant to recognise personal risk and struggle to translate good intentions into sustained action. Unhealthy habits often win out when emotional willpower is low and stress levels high. In the latest lockdown, two-fifths of people admitted they were exercising less in the most recent lockdown than they were in the first, according to a study by UCL.
It’s one of the toughest behavioural challenges to crack, particularly during the pandemic, it is possible to nudge people towards regular exercise. As life became more sedentary at the start of the first lockdown in March, our members recorded a 28 per cent drop in physical activity events predominantly driven by marked reductions in the number of people achieving their daily step count goals.
However, our data shows that this step gap was then offset by a marked increase in cardiovascular workouts – a trend which was sustained throughout 2020. Those that took full advantage of the home work-out apps and devices we provide ended the year 20 per cent more active than they were before lockdown. It suggests that physical activity can be sustained if people are supported in the right way.
Incentivisation is a core part of the answer but it’s not the whole story. Understanding behavioural patterns means challenging the psychological, cultural, social, and emotional biases that affect our decision-making processes.
The importance of feedback is crucial. Giving people a means to improve their behaviours by giving them the tools to help them track progress and improve. Our members ‘earn’ their rewards by being active, mindful or eating a healthy, balanced diet.
As we’ve seen, merely educating people about healthy living does not encourage behaviour change. Goals need to be set for the short and the longer term. We reward behaviour by offering savings on renewal premiums alongside speedier incentives through our partners such as Waitrose and Amazon Prime.
These are just some of the behavioural psychology concepts that are fundamental to our model. While I realise insurance isn’t accessible to everyone, I do believe the simple behaviour change principles that underpin shared value offer important lessons in tackling obesity. A national focus on incentivisation, goal-setting and reward – today and tomorrow. Get it right – people living with the burden of obesity will benefit; society benefits.