Susan Williams has just graduated with her PhD on adolescent health and the tailoring of nutrition and physical activity interventions in schools. Rather than rest on her laurels, she's already doing the groundwork (ethical clearance) for her next research project.

Dr Williams has been awarded a CQUniversity seed grant and intends to compare household food behaviours with the health of children aged between 2 and 5 years.

Dr Susan Williams - food for thought!

"One of the key aspects is family environment and their impact on a child's behavior," she said.

"I'll be analysing household food purchasing behaviours and the actual health and wellbeing of 2 to 5-year-old children. There's such strong connections between parental behaviour and child and adolescent behaviours that we have to think about the family environment as the centrepiece and if we look at health promotion in schools we have to ensure there is family inclusion, otherwise the kids are getting one message at school and maybe a conflicting message at home.

"This family inclusion aim is a big issue because every parent knows there's a lack of time to attend school functions. How do you get information from school to home? Eg. Newsletters get stuck in bags and it's not practical to send too much in mail. How can we bridge the divide between home and school so messages support each other and create line of communication so it works."

Dr Williams said she was fortunate to have contact with 4 or 5 other doctoral students in her department during her PhD journey.

"It was just fantastic and makes a huge difference to be able to discuss the little things at come up," she said.  "It makes a difference having people around you at all levels. Sometimes you are the underling and you move through and there's other people below you. You have expertise at a student level and this is very valuable as a supervisor can only do so much, relying on their memory. They aren't able to provide all the answers and they are not as accessible as your peers."

A keen triathlete and proponent of healthy eating, Dr Williams says it's useful to collect data about obesity and food choices but the Holy Grail of community well-being is to promote what it really means to be healthy and feel healthy.

"I've come to the realisation that many people just don't realise what it feels like to feel good!" she said.

"They put unhealthy food in and they feel unhealthy but they don't make the connection because they think it's just normal to feel that way."

Dr Williams is a former nurse who now runs a private sports nutrition business. She says she has seen people who have a lot of issues around food.

She said society's obsessive fascination with dieting, exacerbated by the media and money-making industry surrounding the issue, has created problems such as yo-yo dieting.

"A lot of people set themselves up for failure.

"Programs like the Biggest Loser are so unrealistic.  People can't physically cope with the stress of exercising 5 hours a day unless they have an army of people monitoring them.

"Success or failure really comes back to little things. For example, I knew one overweight lady who hated walking hard because she didn't like sweating.

"People are forced to do things they don't feel comfortable with or able to do because they don't have the understanding about why they have developed certain behaviours in the first place, and of course behaviours good or bad, develop over a long period of time".

"It's a real minefield and I don't think there's one solution. It has to be a whole, broader community effort where we can work together to create change and healthy behaviours where the focus is on health rather than weight.

"BMI is just an indicator! It's really about health and how we feel; not about the measure of weight.

"The other side of coin is the extremism of the people who don't eat; who think to be healthy you need to be thin and to be thin you need to not eat. There's also associations between being underweight and poor health, often involving drinking and cigarettes.

"Hence focusing on weight is not a good thing. It needs to be used as a measure of comparison to standards, but from a public communication perspective body weight should be downplayed and overall good health should be promoted more."

Dr Williams said few people really think about what they are eating and how they feel.

"They don't have a perception about what is normal and what could be good. When we can change behaviours in a positive way people will have more awareness of how they should feel or what it is to feel good, to have energy and to not feel tired every day.

"There's a lot to be said for trying to promote the whole concept of health and what it really means to be healthy."