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'New year, new me!,' I exclaimed on the first of January as I tucked into a lunch which, to my recollection, was predominantly kale, and swore to myself that not one drop of coffee would touch my lips in 2018.

But, as that popular saying goes, 'old habits die hard', and sure enough, come the second day of the new year, I was enjoying a 'nutritious' breakfast of leftover Christmas cake, while serenely sipping my second coffee of the day.

My aim in sharing this rather dull insight into my life is not merely a feeble attempt at page filler, but a way of illustrating a point to which I'm sure everyone reading this will be able to relate: behaviour change is difficult, and this can be down to a myriad of factors.

This paper, written by a team from the Social and Behavioural Sciences Unit at King's College London, aimed to investigate those factors that may enable or prevent behavioural change of white adults to consume less free sugar.

Against the backdrop of the World Health Organisation's 2015 guidelines on free sugar intake, UK adults are consistently consuming free sugars in excess of the recommended '<5% of total energy intake', with those identifying as white having the highest intake.

The researchers interviewed 27 white ethnic adults (all students or staff at King's College London) using a topic guide to ensure consistency. These interviews were then analysed according to two fairly modern but well-recognised behaviour analysis models: capability-opportunity-motivation-behaviour (COM-B) and the theoretical domains framework (TDF), essentially allowing identification of those factors which may positively or negatively influence behaviour change.

The authors discuss, in some detail, the numerous TDF themes to which participants' comments could be coded, and how these are relevant to changes in behaviour change. The factors identified as having influence upon sugar consumption will not be a revelation for most; for example, increased knowledge of healthy dietary habits facilitates the implementation of such, whilst lack of this knowledge is inhibitory. Equally, the fact that dietary habits can be altered (either positively or negatively) by the social influence of friends and/or family is hardly stop-press news.

That being said, this study has provided a clear indication that the COM-B model, (supplemented by the TDF) provides comprehensive information about the various factors which may influence behaviour change to consume less free sugar.

Although the sample was small (n = 27) and sourced exclusively from an academic setting, the results yielded would suggest that larger-scale use of COM-B/TDF could yield more information of benefit in development of strategies to encourage reduction of free sugar intake.