The key to health promotion and disease prevention in the 21st century
is to establish an environment that supports positive health behaviour and
healthy lifestyle from childhood. The HELENA project includes
cross-sectional, crossover and pilot community intervention multi-centre
studies, as an integrated approach to the above-mentioned problem. Dietary
intake, nutrition knowledge and eating attitudes, food choices and
preferences, body composition, biochemical, physical activity and fitness
and genotype (to analyse gene-nutrient and gene-environment interactions)
assessment will provide the full information about the nutritional and
lifestyle status of the European adolescents. The requirements for health
promoting foods will be also identified, and three sensory acceptable
products for adolescents will be developed. Harmonization and
standardisation of the assessments for both scientific and technological
objectives should result in reliable and comparable data of a representative
sample of European adolescents. This will contribute to understand why
health-related messages are not being as effective as expected in the
adolescent population. A realistic intervention strategy will be proposed in
order to achieve the goals of understanding and effectively enhancing
nutritional and lifestyle habits of adolescents in Europe