National Institute of Food & Agriculture (NIFA) funds long-term efforts to reduce childhood obesity

Hot off the presses

The USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) has just awarded $4.9 million to the University of Michigan to reduce the prevalence of childhood obesity among Head Start preschoolers in Michigan. The long-term outcome for this program is to reduce the prevalence of overweight and obese children and adolescents ages 2 to 19 years.

Why preschool age children?

Preschool years are reportedly a critical time for children to develop eating behaviors, positive or negative. And in the US, 1 out of every 5 children is obese in the preschool age category. Moreover, low-income children are 2 times more likely to be overweight than their middle-class or upper income counterparts.

“Obesity is perhaps the most pressing nutritional problem in America, with childhood and adolescent obesity rates tripling in the past 30 years,” says NIFA director Roger Beachy, Ph.D., who made the award announcement Monday at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.

“A goal for NIFA is to support research and develop methods, built on sound science, that will reverse the rising trend of obesity and help children and their families adopt healthy eating habits that will last a lifetime.”

Core programs and research:

The NIFA grant will make the following efforts possible:

• Development of an obesity intervention program based on the premise that enhancing a child’s ability to control certain emotions and behaviors is a key component of effective obesity prevention
• Evaluation of 600 Head Start children and their families and their response to the Preschool Obesity Prevention Series (POPS), a curriculum that focuses on obesity-related health behaviors
• Evaluation of the response to the POPS intervention combined with the Incredible Years Series (IYS), an evidence-based program designed to improve preschoolers’ emotional and behavioral self-regulation.

The University of Michigan team members propose that combining intervention strategies of POPS and IYS will lead to the greatest improvements in obesity-related health behaviors.

Cooperative Extension and Head Start educators who collaborate in the project will receive training and educational curricula and assist in determining the effectiveness of the program.

And the best part of this trial? If successful, the results will be widely disseminated to teachers around the country.

For more information, please visit the USDA web site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 4th, 2011 at 7:30 am and is filed under childhood obesity, nutrition & health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.