Profound dietary changes are occurring across Mediterranean countries, largely due to cultural and socio-economic-driven lifestyle changes, that are leading to the erosion of Mediterranean food cultures. Families have historically played a key role transferring the essence of Mediterranean Diet (MD) style and are essential for educating new generations in acquiring healthy and sustainable habits. SWITCHtoHEALTHY project aims to generate a dietary behaviour change by demonstrating and reinforcing the role of the family in promoting a sustainable change towards enhancing the adherence to the Mediterranean dietary pattern of the family members (adults, adolescents, and children). This will be done by educating and making available to families a combination of hands-on educational material and digital tools and complementing the dietary and lifestyle recommendations with easy-to-eat healthier snacking products. In SWITCHtoHEALTHY families are active players in project innovations co-developments as well as main receptors and promoters of the change, not only regarding their (and their siblings) wellbeing and health but also with respect to market dynamics and sustainability. SWITCHtoHEALTHY is fully aligned with Topic 1.3.1 challenge, scope and impacts as it is addressed to enhance the adherence to MD in a holistic approach stressing the vital role of families, fostering education,respecting seasonal rhythms and festive events but also valorising local biodiversity and increasing incomes for local food companies and producers. SWITCHtoHEALTHY is unique in its concept because small but long-lasting changes of family’s habits and behaviours will be achieved not only by providing information on the benefits of the MD, delivering dietary recommendations and healthy, but by educating families offering them entertaining, user-friendly and popular digital tools and materials to support behavioural change together with an empowerment through gaming. This will result in overall health improvement and easy long-term adherence to the MD, also considering implications of COVID-19 on healthy eating habits. SWITCHtoHEALTHY adopts a citizen-centric 3-Step circular approach starting from citizens and delivering innovations back. Each step is composed of WPs designed to attain project objectives and impacts: 1) Citizen engagement and co-creation (WP1) to carry out an exploratory characterisation of European current food consumption patterns and to co-create consumer-oriented business models(BMs) by engaging the family in product and tools development. 2) Development of products(WP2) and digital and educational tools (WP3) designed to encourage and maintain a shift towards healthy and sustainable MD. 3) Deployment (WP4) where a total of 360 families will be enrolled in a multicentre intervention study (120 families/country in 3 countries, Spain, Morocco, and Turkey) where the developments of WP2 and WP3 are integrated in a way that allow the Assessment (WP5) of the health impact of the quality of the diet as well as the economic and environmental benefits. Finally, 4) Creation of Enabling Environment (WP6) to delivery guidelines to support policymakers; communication and awareness campaign across Med-countries; marketing strategies and consumer-oriented sustainable BMs. Multi-actor and cross-sector collaboration in SWITCHtoHEALTHY consortium (nutrition, food innovation, businesses, policy makers, consumers, education, associations and academics) is brought to determine a sustained shift of dietary behaviour and would allow that all SWITCHtoHEALTHY innovations, targeting citizens, consumers, industry, and policymakers, attain the final common purpose of achieving a higher adherence to MD among European population, extrapolating models for concretely generate dietary behaviour change that are reproducible and replicable also in other environments and countries.

Impact sector: New products and services, Agriculture and fisheries and forestry, Health and social services

Outcome target group: Families Schools Nutritionists Food companies

Implemented best practices (BPiMED): Clustering and Networking