Barriers and facilitators to healthy active living in South Asian families in Canada: a thematic analysis.

Objectives: The study objective was to understand the barriers and facilitators to healthy active living in South Asian families living in Canada.
Design: Semi-structured interviews of 30-60-minute duration with South Asian women with young families, and analysed using a thematic analytical approach.
Setting: Community-dwelling South Asian women interviewed in the home environment or by phone.
Participants: Fifteen married South Asian women (mean age=34.2 years) living in the Peel region of Ontario, Canada, with at least 1 child under the age of 5 years. The majority of women had immigrated to Canada (13/15), during a 5-10-year interval preceding interviews.
Results: 57 different codes were derived from 18 interview hours, and further evaluated through member checking. The top three barriers to healthy eating were: (1) not having enough time for healthy food preparation, (2) lack of knowledge about what is healthy eating and (3) viewing healthy eating as a matter of engaging in time limited dieting. These barriers were addressed with: (1) knowledge and awareness of healthy eating, (2) clear goal setting, (3) access to fresh vegetables and fruits and (4) better arrangements and more time for food preparation. The top five barriers to physical activity were: (1) not enough time and energy, (2) competing priorities, (3) lack of childcare, (4) lack of family-engaging exercise and (5) limited access to interesting exercise programming. These barriers were addressed by: (1) experiencing exercise as enjoyable and stress releasing, (2) commitments to walking exercise, (3) use of an electronic exercise-tracking device, (4) offspring exercise supported by spouse and family and (5) success stories about exercise from others.
Conclusions: Barriers to healthy active living in South Asian women with young families can be addressed with facilitators that stimulate clear goal setting and healthy food preparation skills, and exercise formats that engage mothers and offspring, with or without exercise tracking.
Competing Interests: Competing interests: RJD has served as an external resource person to the World Health Organization’s Nutrition Guidelines Advisory Group on trans fats, saturated fats, and polyunsaturated fats. The WHO paid for his travel and accommodation to attend meetings from 2012-2017 to present and discuss this work. He has presented updates of this work to the WHO in 2022. He has also done contract research for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism, and Diabetes, Health Canada, and the World Health Organization for which he received remuneration. He has received speaker’s fees from the University of Toronto, and McMaster Children’s Hospital. He has held grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canadian Foundation for Dietetic Research, Population Health Research Institute, and Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation as a principal investigator, and is a co-investigator on several funded team grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He has served as an independent director of the Helderleigh Foundation (Canada). He serves as a member of the Nutrition Science Advisory Committee to Health Canada (Government of Canada), and a co-opted member of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) Subgroup on the Framework for the Evaluation of Evidence (Public Health England).PR is currently funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health (2021–2025). He coordinates research with NexJ Health, which provides a software platform to convey the psychosocial and psychiatric programming he develops and assesses. He receives no personal compensations for studies coordinated with NexJ but does receive free-of-charge platform support. All other authors declare no conflicts of interest.
(© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)