Impact | Creating health awareness in communities with a low socioeconomic status

The nominees for the Ben Feringa Impact Award 2025 introduce themselves and their impactful research or project. The winners will be annouced on 13 May. This week the last nominee: Tim van Zutphen with his research aimed to create awareness of healthy nutrition in communities with low socioeconomic status.

Who are you?

My name is Tim van Zutphen and I am assistant professor of Health & Food at Campus Fryslân. I also hold a position at the Laboratory of Paediatrics of the UMCG.

Can you explain what your research is about?

The participatory research, conducted together with the target group, aimed to create awareness of healthy nutrition, and specifically to integrate more fruits and vegetables into the daily diet. The participants of the 058 Samen Sterk (Strong Together) foundation in Leeuwarden indicated that they struggle to cook a healthy meal in the Dutch food environment. With some support, participants then tried to prepare a lunch for the group that they are familiar with using a Dutch vegetable. For example, someone prepared the Iranian dish dolma using endive leaves instead of grape leaves. Together with Esmee de Jong, my intern at the time, I conducted an evaluation before and after eight lunches in total, which showed that the awareness of fruit and vegetable consumption had increased.

How does society benefit from your research?

In communities with many vulnerable people, such as Leeuwarden East where the participants of the 058 Samen Sterk foundation live, life expectancy is below average and the people contract a chronic disease 15 years earlier on average. A healthy lifestyle plays an important part in this, but there are too many underlying factors that make it difficult for people to live a healthy life. Unfortunately, these health differences have not decreased by the decades-long policy. By starting from the bottom up, our research — connected to a citizens’ initiative — reaches the people concerned and appears to have a positive impact on a healthy lifestyle.

In addition, the recipes that people came up with led to tasty dishes, so we gathered the recipes in a cookbook. The participants became the authors of this book and with that received a platform at our University.

What was your personal motivation?

I find it unfair that there are such large health differences in a country as rich as the Netherlands. I want to contribute to decreasing those differences. Cycling between the community centre and the Faculty made me think that it sometimes seemed as though two different worlds existed within a stone's throw of each other. By taking my students into the neighbourhoods, I managed to burst their academic bubble.

Other than academic knowledge, I learned about experiential knowledge. This type of knowledge makes it possible to take contextual factors into account. Especially in communities with many vulnerable people, this personal social and physical context is very important. Because people feel unheard or abandoned, there is a lot of institutional distrust in these communities, but in order to tackle the problem from the bottom up, we need cooperation on an equal footing. I first had to earn that trust in order to be able to create something beautiful together.