Nearly 1.6 million adults in Wales live with obesity or are overweight, and more children are obese by the time they start primary school in Wales than in any other region of the UK. This project aims to show the data gaps which, if filled, could improve our understanding of this challenge, and in turn support, Nesta and other stakeholders to design, test and scale solutions that decrease the prevalence of obesity in Wales.

Achieving both the Welsh Government's goals of preventing and reducing obesity — and Nesta’s own goal that the UK will have halved the prevalence of obesity by 2030 — will require all organisations who share this goal to have access to the information they need to:

• Understand the drivers of obesity — for example, how do different factors, such as the cost of food, distance to supermarkets and availability of healthier foods, impact access to healthier foods in urban and rural areas?
• Effectively design and target interventions to those most at risk — for example, which foods should be prioritised for reformulation to improve the diets of young people with excess weight?
• Evaluate what works and for whom — for example, if implemented in Wales, what impact would mandatory calorie labelling have on consumers’ food choices and obesity prevalence?

While one-off studies, where information is not collected on an ongoing basis or shared with others, may be enough to achieve ‘one-off policy wins’, we need many such wins over a number of years to reduce obesity in Wales. For this reason, our vision is a whole data ecosystem that provides regular, accurate and sufficiently granular data on obesity and its drivers, which in turn will allow us and others to design, test and scale better solutions.

When the COVID pandemic hit the UK in 2020, we saw a similar data ecosystem rapidly emerge. It provided accurate and open information on infections, hospitalisations, deaths and vaccinations. This information was collected by a variety of organisations and was quickly made available to all those that needed it to make important decisions.

We need a similar ecosystem, ideally created with a similar level of urgency, for tackling obesity in Wales. While we must continue to make progress with the data we do have available, we should also invest in building a better ecosystem. A first step to creating this ideal data ecosystem is understanding where there are currently gaps in access to data.

In this context, a ‘data gap’ is a lack of data that reduces the ability of Nesta, the Welsh Government and other stakeholders to decrease the prevalence of obesity. Data gaps can occur because no data is collected or existing data does not meet the needs of users. Examples include data that is not sufficiently granular (perhaps there are no regional or demographic breakdowns), is prohibitively expensive, very delayed, or of poor quality.

While ‘data’ is often thought of as numbers, it also includes textual information (such as nutritional labels) and images (such as advertising billboards). All these forms of data can inform our understanding and increase the effectiveness, of our efforts to reduce obesity.

In the course of this project, conducted between January and May 2023, we developed an approach to identify data gaps, which we will continue to refine. A more in-depth description of the methodology is provided in our blog titled 'Mind the gap'.

Nesta’s healthy life mission has five focus areas:

1. improving evidence on diets
2. reducing less-healthy food and drink promotion
3. reducing the energy content of food and drink
4. improving access to healthier food and drink
5. understanding the attitudes of decision makers.

In each area, the mission team has set goals. We used these to build a vision of the ‘ideal data ecosystem’ which would allow the team to perfectly track and achieve these goals. On ‘reducing energy content of food and drink’, for example, the ideal data ecosystem might contain a database that captures the nutritional composition of foods over time. While other factors do contribute to obesity — such as genetics or activity levels — these were not considered in this analysis as they are outside Nesta's areas of focus.

We then spent considerable time identifying the aspects of these ecosystems that already exist. This involved extensive desk research and speaking with an array of experts. In areas where some data was found to exist, we assessed its potential to meet our requirements. In many areas, however, we found that virtually no data was available and the gaps were sizeable.

Having identified the gaps, we gave each gap a priority rating of low, medium or high, based on the following criteria:

• Time sensitivity— is the gap related to a policy currently being considered, in which case new data could lead to immediate impact?
• Potential impact — what is the potential impact on obesity that may result from this data becoming accessible?
• Effort required — how large is the gap between the data that is available and what is preferable?

Gaps that have been prioritised as high are those that Nesta would be particularly keen to explore how, in partnership with others, we might begin to address.

Data gaps are subjective, as data that is adequate to meet one organisation’s needs may be inadequate for another’s. Gaps may also be filled (rending information out of date). Finally, given the large number of potential data providers, it is easy to miss a data source and incorrectly assume there is a gap.

If you have any corrections to our map, or would like to discuss how we might be able to work together in the future to improve and enrich data in Wales - please contact Jonathan Bone at: [email protected].