Program Helps Hispanic Kids Adopt Healthier Lifestyle, Prevents Excess Weight Gain

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Hispanic children who participated in a unique weight-maintenance pilot intervention were more likely to adopt healthy lifestyles, resulting in healthier weights, than children who didn’t participate, according to a UT Health Science Center at San Antonio study in the June 2015 issue of the journal Childhood Obesity.

The pilot study, which paved the way for a new $2.9 million grant to test the intervention on a larger scale through 2019, was implemented with parent-child pairs in a rural clinic in New Braunfels, Texas.

Children who participated were Hispanic, ages 5-14, and obbaseball boyese/overweight.

“Comprehensive behavioral programs have been shown to help these children improve their weight status. However, more efficient interventions that can be done in primary care clinics must be developed for Hispanic children,” said Dr. Deborah Parra-Medina, study author and professor at the Institute for Health Promotion Research at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

The pilot study trained pediatric health care providers and staff to implement a “standard care” intervention with behavioral counseling.

Half of the randomized participants received additional behavioral intervention components, including a face-to-face counseling session with a health educator immediately after the participant’s first visit with the pediatrician and monthly telephone counseling and mailed newsletters for the four-month period. The also had to choose and adopt two of 11 healthy lifestyle strategies, including eating a daily healthy breakfast, not drinking sugary drinks, and limiting eating out.

The 59 families who received additional counseling and education did better than those that did not receive the additional behavioral intervention.

The standard-care children had a 90.2% weight gain while the intervention group had a 70.2% weight gain.

The standard care participants had a 73.8% waist circumference increase while the intervention participants had a 50.9% increase.

“In these studies, we do not promote weight loss with children. We promote a healthier rate of weight gain. Children have the advantage of growing. We hope to slow down their weight gain so they can grow into their weight. We hope they will adopt these healthy lifestyle changes so they will not leave childhood overweight or obese and continue that trajectory into adulthood and become obese adults,” Parra-Medina said.

See details on the new, larger study here.

By The Numbers By The Numbers

20.7

percent

of Latino kids have obesity (compared to 11.7% of white kids)

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