WDC33: A Social Marketing Campaign for Promoting Healthy Eating Choices among Preadolescent Children
(Multistate Research Project)
Status: Inactive/Terminating
WDC33: A Social Marketing Campaign for Promoting Healthy Eating Choices among Preadolescent Children
Duration: 10/01/2013 to 09/30/2014
Administrative Advisor(s):
NIFA Reps:
Non-Technical Summary
Statement of Issues and Justification
While obesity prevalence continues to rise among all children, the 2009-2010 rate was higher for 6-11 and 12-19 year olds than for those aged 2-5 (CDC, 2012). There is an increasing need for parents to be motivated and use practical approaches to encourage preadolescent children (10-13 y.) to make healthy food choices at all eating occasions. Behaviors by parents and caregivers are a dominant influence on preadolescents eating behaviors and therefore play an essential role in preventing obesity. Our preliminary work on calcium rich food and beverages (CRF/B) has revealed that when parents have expectations or rules about healthy beverages, make CRF/B available and practice or role model CRF/B consumption, childrens intakes are higher. Making foods available and role modeling are pre-requisite to creating rules and expectations for healthy habits. Preadolescents are becoming independent in their eating choices at school and at home, and this is a critical time period for parental influences that might promote healthy eating. If parents are successful in developing good habits and choices among their children now, it may avert the associated poor outcomes of unhealthy eating including obesity. Family habits influence healthy eating among adolescents (Berge et al, 2010) as well as among college students who also reported that healthier eating was facilitated by having healthy family eating habits as a child (Cluskey & Grobe, 2009).
Many benefits that support the prevention of childhood obesity have been associated with family or regular meals, such as higher intakes of fruits, vegetables, dairy and other nutrients (Neumark-Sztainer, et al., 2003). We will operationally define consumption patterns as being two-fold: 1) regular, family or planned eating occasions and 2) non-meal eating occasions. The term, snack may imply a sanctioned or planned eating occasion, but not a regular meal. It may be important when studying eating occasions to be cautious in referring to non-meal eating only as snackas random eating occasions might be overlooked. The focus of this proposal involves identifying both the child and parental behaviors relative to the food/beverage choices that preadolescents make in all snack and non-meal eating occasions.
Recent evidence from the Department of Labor Statistics Time Use Studies (USDL Bureau of Labor, 2012) reported that trends in consumption behavior in the U.S. are undergoing an interesting and potentially hazardous shift. Over the past 30 years, the frequency of family meals has decreased by 33%. The frequency of primary eating (focused eating/drinking without engaging in another activity) is also decreasing while frequency of secondary eating and especially drinking (eating while engaging in another activity) is increasing (USDA ERS, 2008). Snacking, or non-meal eating makes up 27% of caloric intake for 7-12 year olds, exceeding 500 kcals/day (Piernas & Popkin, 2010). Snacks are made up largely of salty snacks and sweets and sweetened beverages. Meal frequency was associated with increased total kcal intake and eating beyond 3 times/day was associated with higher BMI in adults (Howarth et al, 2007). However, Huang et al (2012) could not link increased BMI to snacking among adolescents. Instead, these authors suggested that choice of snack rather than frequency was related to total kcal intake among children (Huang et al, 2012). This evidence justifies the need to investigate adolescent non-meal eating behavior, and how parental behaviors may impact their choices. Understanding the behavior of non-meal eating occasions among adolescents is necessary to reduce the consumption of high energy density snacks.
Social marketing approaches utilize research methodology and marketing techniques to create behavior change in a target audience. That methodology focuses on clearly examining all of the circumstances surrounding the behavior, which then can be used to develop approaches to change that behavior. It relies on creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have positive value for the target audience and changes in behavior that benefit society at large (Lee and Kotler, 2011). It is clearly beneficial to control the development of chronic diseases among those who are obese both for their own well-being as well as the economic costs associated with developing or managing chronic diseases. There are general benefits for all of us if we can decrease the societal externalities or costs of accelerating health care demands and expenditures that are associated with obesity. The behavior of non-meal eating is influenced by our changing lifestyles as well as the varied contexts in which we eat, the people with whom we interact and environmental factors. Exploring the childs perception about what influences their own behavior gives a perspective of the costs and rewards of the behavior that need to be addressed to influence parental behaviors. With a broader understanding of the behavior, we can attempt to provide products (programs, knowledge, and/or messages) that may serve as realistic strategies and motivators for parents to promote better habits. All of this requires a thorough analysis and approach which we think is well suited for social marketing techniques.
Related, Current and Previous Work
Objectives