European Research Funding for obesity prevention among youth?

Late last week we had our first web-based conference call for the HOPE project (Health promotion through Obesity Prevention in Europe, http://www.hopeproject.eu/), to discuss the project’s progress. Colleagues from IOTF (http://www.iotf.org/), Erasmus University Medical Centre’s department of Public Health (http://www2.eur.nl/fgg/mgz/), University of Oslo’s department of Nutrition (http://www.med.uio.no/imb/nutri/english/index.html), University of Ghent University’s department of Movement and Sports Sciences (http://www.lo-bsw.ugent.be/), Unit for Health Services Research and International Health –IRCCS Burlo, in Trieste, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale –INSERM, In Paris, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and from the EMGO-Institute of the VU University Medical Centre (http://www.emgo.nl/) were all in front of the pc with their headsets to talk about the progress in subsequent workpackages of the EU funded project.

The HOPE project aims to further explore determinants of overweight across Europe, and to identify effective strategies for obesity prevention, based on existing data and networks.
An important extension to the HOPE project would be to use and further enrich this information to develop and test new intervention schemes for prevention of unnecessary weight gain. One of the calls for proposals within the EU 7th framework program (see http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html) indeed asks for such research specifically aimed at children and adolescents, and we are now in the final stages of preparing exactly such a proposal together with partners from different countries across Europe. Next week the proposal will need to be in Brussels...