University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researcher Rachel Novotny is helping provide one of the clearest pictures yet of childhood obesity and community health across the Pacific.
Novotny, director of the Children’s Healthy Living Center of Excellence at the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience, served as lead author of a key paper in a three-part series published in The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific. She also co-authored the other two papers.
The series brings together evidence from 22 Pacific Island countries and territories, helping address a long-standing challenge of fragmented health data across the region.
“The Pacific overall is not well understood globally because it consists of many small places with diverse historical influences,” Novotny said. “This series helps us see our Pacific community and the commonalities we share amidst all that diversity. It serves as a goalpost to show where we are and to encourage collaborative action.”
Shared values across the Pacific
Novotny’s paper examined 33 studies encompassing more than 33,000 children aged 2 to 11 years and reviewed community and school-based interventions to prevent or manage child and adolescent obesity. The findings revealed that overweight and obesity rates increased as children grew older and were generally higher among boys and within higher-income households, due to imported, high-calorie foods and lower daily physical activity.
Intervention programs had more success when locally co-designed and tailored to local cultural contexts and supported by policy actions.
Models for regional collaboration
While regions like Hawaiʻi and Alaska were excluded from the series’ dataset due to World Health Organization classifications of the region, long-term programs developed at UH Mānoa – such as the Children’s Healthy Living Center of Excellence – offer practical models co-developed with US-affiliated Pacific jurisdictions with relevance for neighboring island nations.
“Our work shows the value of building a shared community of researchers across the Pacific,” Novotny said. “We hope this series serves as a call to action to maintain monitoring of nutrition and health, strengthen local policies, and share strategies to improve the nutrition and health of Pacific children.”
