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Measure Up

Also: Measure-Up

Australian Government obesity campaign launched in 2008 that linked waist size to chronic disease risk and asked adults to measure their waists.

Years
2008–now
Country
Australia
Topic
DiabetesNutritionPhysical activity
Asks people to
RecognizeStart
Strategy
Simple instruction
Channel
OutdoorPrintRadioTV
Audience
Adults

Evidence

ObservationalMixed

Pre/post surveys in New South Wales (King 2013): 38% unprompted and 89% prompted awareness. Knowledge of the risky waist size rose more than 5-fold and waist measuring increased, but fruit, vegetable and physical activity levels did not change. Those more aware had better outcomes (2015).

Sponsor (who paid)

  • Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing Foreign government, funder

Credits (who made it)

Not recorded yet.

Related campaigns

Sources

  1. King EL et al. Evaluating the effectiveness of an Australian obesity mass-media campaign: how did the 'Measure-Up' campaign measure up in New South Wales?. Health Educ Res 2013;28(6):1029-39 evaluation · 2013 · DOI 10.1093/her/cyt084 · PMID 23962490
  2. Grunseit AC et al. Getting the message across: outcomes and risk profiles by awareness levels of the "measure-up" obesity prevention campaign in Australia. PLoS One 2015;10(4):e0121387 evaluation · 2015 · DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0121387 · PMID 25844811
  3. O'Hara BJ et al. Impact of the Swap It, Don't Stop It Australian National Mass Media Campaign on Promoting Small Changes to Lifestyle Behaviors. J Health Commun 2016 evaluation · 2016 · DOI 10.1080/10810730.2016.1245803 · PMID 27892841

Research notes

Created 2026-10-22 by literature mining (PubMed/OpenAlex); evidence level, outcome and findings are paraphrased from the evaluation abstracts, full texts not read. No credits: no page naming an agency was checked. Evaluation sources added 2026-10-22 (citation snowballing / helpline pass): O'Hara 2016; evidence level and outcome unchanged.

Record cases/au-measure-up.json, updated 2026-10-22· Link to this campaign