PRC Other Projects

Muscatine and Fort Dodge Community School Districts Project

PI: Linda Snetselaar

Carver Trust

Linda Snetselaar talks with school kids about healthy food choices.

The obesity epidemic has increased greatly over the past three decades with children 6 to 11 in the most danger of disease and decreased longevity.  In 1980, 6.5 percent of children were identified as obese (at or above the 95 percentile on US growth charts) today we are seeing a leveling off but at the 17 percent level.  Most at risk are girls with 20 percent of Mexican-American origin in the obese category.

With these statistics we are devising a research project involving two Iowa communities, Muscatine and Fort Dodge, Iowa.  The project has included community based participatory principals that resulted in strategies for schools focused on increasing exercise and a healthy diet.  With these strategies we will work with a matching process and a traditional statistical evaluation to determine the outcome of the project.  Additionally we plan to design a dissemination component that will include research outcomes indicating the most productive means of building on research results.

The specific aims are:

1. To implement strategies tied to clearly-defined outcome measures with collaborative data collection methods against which progress can be tracked and evaluated over a two year period.
2. To disseminate study results to other communities in Iowa and the US including research on which methods of dissemination are most optimum for strategy implementation.

Child Obesity Prevention: Improving the Nutritional Environment at School Sporting Events

PI: Helena Laroche

Wellmark Foundation of Iowa

These Muscatine Muskie football players will be featured in a new ad campaign at Muscatine High School promoting new healthy foods at the concession stand.

This project works with the Muscatine School District, parent volunteers groups (Muscatine Booster Club), and food distributors to improve the nutrition environment for parents and children. The goals are to:

1. Increase the availability of healthy foods (i.e. lower fat, lower sugar, fruits and vegetables) for sale at school sporting events.
2. Identify healthy food alternatives that are acceptable to rural consumers and profitable for vendors.
3. Identify and reduce barriers to the sale of healthy food by volunteer groups. 
4. Model a process for changes that can be easily adopted by other volunteer groups.
5. Motivate other groups running concession stands to offer healthy alternatives.

Behavior Measurement in the MOVE! Program

PI: Faryle Nothwehr

Weight management studies routinely measure outcomes such as pounds lost, physiological changes, or changes in dietary intake using food frequency questionnaires (FFQ).  While these measures are informative and reflect personal behavior, more specific and proximal measures of behavior are feasible to obtain and likely to be helpful.  For example, common behavioral objectives may include: selecting leaner meats and lower-fat dairy products, preparing foods in ways that minimize fat content, and resisting social pressures to eat high fat foods. Lack of systematic measurement of such behavioral objectives has limited interpretation of the results of interventions and limited our understanding of behavioral aspects of the recidivism process.  The PI of the study has recently developed and tested a set of scales of diet and exercise-related behavioral strategies that help fill this measurement gap.  These scales were included in a community survey of rural Iowans, and were shown to have very good reliability and validity. While this suggests that the measures are promising tools for evaluation of community-level interventions, one cannot presume that they will be equally useful in the unique population that participates in a clinic-based weight management program.  Confirming the psychometric properties of these scales in such a population is a critical preliminary step toward using them in future research projects in this setting.  In collaboration with Dr. Joseph Dillon, Director of the VA weight management program called MOVE!, these measures are being tested among participants who appear for the program orientation. These preliminary data will be used in a future proposal to the VA to evaluate the behavioral impact of the program over time. The two aims are:

1. To determine the psychometric characteristics of measures of diet and exercise behavioral strategies in the VA population enrolled in the MOVE program.

2. To refine a recruitment process and estimate a recruitment rate that will be useful for planning a future study in this population.

To read about the core research projects at the PRC click here.