Carol Byrd-Bredbenner
Parents serve as their children’s role models, and they buy most of the food their children eat. With that in mind, researchers from Rutgers, the University of Florida and West Virginia University will work with a five-year, $4 million grant to try to change home eating habits to help curb obesity.
The USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) allocated more than $6.6 million in grants nationwide in FY 2017 to combat childhood obesity, a public health issue affecting one in five school-aged children. One of the NIFA grants included $800,000 to Rutgers to support an online educational program to help parents promote healthy eating and home environments among preschool-age children. The funding is made possible through NIFA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), authorized by the 2014 Farm Bill. The AFRI Childhood Obesity Prevention Challenge Area supports projects to gain a better understanding of the factors behind childhood weight gain, to develop effective interventions, and to train more parents, caregivers, and educators to promote childhood obesity prevention.
The multi-state, multidisciplinary researchers hope to disseminate an educational program known as HomeStyles so it continues reducing the risk of obesity among preschool children. They also want to adapt and expand it to families with children who are 6 to 11 years old.
At Rutgers, the HomeStyles project is under the advisement of distinguished professor Carol Byrd-Bredbenner, Department of Nutritional Sciences assisted by graduate students Kaitlyn Eck, Colleen Delaney and Samantha Teeple.
HomeStyles – developed by Rutgers faculty — teaches parents the principles through 12 instructional guides that focus on positive diet, physical activity and sleep strategies that families can implement at home. It also includes forms for tracking family goals. The parents get to choose which topics are most relevant to them and how they will apply that information.
Kaitlyn Eck commented, “We developed the HomeStyles program to enable and motivate parent of young children to shape their home environments and lifestyle practices to support optimal child growth, development, and health. It helps families do an even better job of raising happy, healthy, strong kids with healthy weights.” She continued, “The intervention will have interactive lessons that focus on strategies parents can use in partnership with their middle childhood-aged kids (6- to 11-years-old) to shape one aspect of the home environment and lifestyle. The intervention will be developed by the project team and undergraduate and graduate students.”