Environmental and Psychosocial Factors into Polices Designed to Promote Drinking Water Consumption among Children and Adolescents

Abstract

Low drinking water intake in Mexico is considered a public health problem due to its linkage with some other negative factors related to lifestyle and eating behavior. Choosing beverages is the result of the interaction between physiological mechanisms, common knowledge and social context; including social interaction, availability, convenience, marketing, peer pressure and cultural practices. Until recently, there was limited interest on these ecological factors related to water consumption in Mexican children and adolescents. Understanding the relationships among this population habits and psychosocial or environmental factors, which shape drinking behavior, will enable the identification of specific populations at the risk of low water intake and allow to understand the problem of low drinking water consumption and the need to consider this factors while planning an strategy or policy to improve water intake among children and adolescents. In Mexico, one sixth of the population has no access to drinking water and almost 40% lack basic sanitation. These figures are worse in marginalized vulnerable urban communities where it has been suggested that only 18% of children and adolescents reach water consumption recommendations. As this population spends most of their time in schools and home, these places should been considered key places to promote water consumption as long as the availability, quality of water, sociodemographic conditions, water security, and social norms/cultural behaviors being ensured. Despite drinking water promotion has gained a global spotlight and even though numerous campaigns and policy interventions to promote water intake has been considering for creating population-wide improvements in health behavior, there is a need to innovate campaigns and widespread government public health initiatives through a novel approach which involves multicomponent environmental modification. Thus, in this paper, we provide an overview of the major environmental and psychosocial factors related to water consumption behavior that should be considered to guarantee a better impact of drinking water policies.