Hello all! I hope your month has been going great to far. Today I will be talking about South America. Specifically, some initiatives they have produced in order to take actionable steps to being healthier as a community via BE strategies.
In 2024, Brazil and Argentina spearheaded a movement that aimed to “nudge” their citizens toward healthier ways of living. The two countries led this movement with the notion that change needed to be made. For the past 50 years, the obesity levels in South America has been on the rise, especially in more under-privileged areas. For this reason, they wanted to change the status quo.
The influence of these desire is obvious, with a 15% increase in consistent physical activity and a 10% drop in the consumption of sugary beverages among the populace within year one. The biggest engagement from the program was from urban areas, which previously saw the worst rise in obesity (partially due to population size). They did this in part with a focus on affordability by paying for gym memberships, supermarkets, and new public spaces for physical activity that were opened to the public, without charge, in and around neighborhoods.
The initiatives improved both the cost and the availability of healthier foods, which removed two of the main reasons people had for not eating better. They also went further and set up “media health campaigns” to push the same message—that part of what it means to live a long, healthy life is to exercise more and eat right. They used a range of media, including TV, to spread their revised “Eat This, Not That” messages.
An additional key element of the reach of the initiatives was their targeting of schools and workplaces. In schools, programs were implemented to stimulate an increase in the levels of physical activity and the consumption of more healthful, although not necessarily “healthy,” food among students. That stimulatory program also served as a main focus of the combined National Recovery Strategy; it was to be carried out over a time horizon of 5 years. In workplaces, employers were nudged to do more, to help more with wellness programs and the incentivization of more healthful behavior among their employees.
One might ask, how is this possible? Well, this is largely the work of the behavioral economics principals of Nudge Theory and loss aversion. Both of these principals promote environmental stimuli in order to aid in creating subconcious decisions for people.
Campaigns associated with these principles zeroed in on the negative aspects of poor lifestyle choices, via slogans like “Elige Vivir” (“Choose to Live”) that highlighted the unhealthy and life-threatening outcomes of fast food, lack of exercise, and other poor choices, using the worst-case scenario to jolt individuals into making better choices. “Look! Everyone else is doing it”—is good for behavior change, and using it in conjunction with threat messages gives an even greater push, as was done in the “Colorímetro” initiative to encourage the consumption of fruits and vegetables.
The nudging, loss aversion, and social norm principles are versatile and can be employed across many health issues. They are not only succeeding in South America but also have the potential to inspire similar initiatives in other developing regions confronted by the same public health challenges. Specifically, as these efforts serve to promote healthier, less risky behaviors, the means by which they do so are diversifying and setting a new standard for public health interventions in the developing world.
The global reach of these initiatives means their influence will extend well beyond South America. Today, we should be aiming to take apart in these type of initiatives. No matter how silly it may be, I feel like these silly ways of getting involved are what makes being a part of these initiatives so great. Overall, we should try for this “Everybody else is doing it!”
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