Salud America! Pilot Awardees
Dr. Carmen Nevarez, Public Health Institute, California
“Evaluation of the Impact of a Menu-Labeling Program (Smart Menu/La Salud Tiene Sabor) in South Los Angeles"
This project will evaluate the impact of Smart Menu/La Salud Tiene Sabor (Health Has Flavor), a program led by an alliance of independently owned restaurants, community-based organizations and the Los Angeles County Public Health Department. The project aims to decrease childhood obesity rates by empowering South Los Angeles families to make healthy food choices via access to healthy menu items, complete with nutrition information. Environmental and patron assessments, stakeholder surveys, secondary data and media and sales tracking analyses will be used to create an evaluation of the program’s impact on families’ purchase intentions/meal choices and vendor practices/sales. A report describing the program’s accomplishments, challenges and lessons learned to advance replication of the model will be used to inform California’s menu labeling legislation, as well as the public.
PowerPoint about Project
Dr. Norma Olvera, University of Houston
“From Mothers to Daughters: A Physical Activity Dosage Intervention to Impact Adiposity”
This project will assess and compare the efficacy of two exercise programs in reducing adiposity indicators and in increasing daily minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) in Latino mothers and their 9- to 14-year-old daughters in Houston. The first program, BOUNCE, provides one weekly exercise session, and the second program, ReBOUNCE, is an after-school aerobic program providing three exercise sessions per week. After participating in BOUNCE, 50 Latino mother and daughter pairs will be randomly assigned either to continue in BOUNCE (control condition) or to switch to ReBOUNCE (experimental condition). The programs are hosted at a local school, a community center, and adjacent parks. The project hypothesizes that the ReBOUNCE program will be more effective in reducing adiposity indicators and increasing MVPA minutes because of the two additional exercise sessions per week.
PowerPoint about Project
Dr. Javier Rosado, Florida State University
“A Measurement of Obesity: BMI Screenings Across Two Settings”
This project will assess the level at which weight-related medical attention is currently being rendered during well-child checks at a rural pediatric community health center located within a predominantly Latino, migrant farm-working community in Florida. Using structured interviews, families will be questioned postvisit to assess whether their child’s weight was discussed by the physician and their awareness of, agreement with, and cultural/gender-based perceptions of the weight-related information provided. As a comparison, similar types of information will be gathered via structured telephone interviews from a group of Latino parents whose children will be participating in school-based body mass index (BMI) screenings and parent notification programs. Several analytical tools will be used to examine study outcomes, and dissemination of results to administrators and service providers within the collaborating organizations will help in developing future obesity research protocols.
PowerPoint about Project
Dr. Emma Sanchez, University of California, San Francisco
“Informing Latino Childhood Obesity Prevention: The Role of Physical Education Policies in California”
Although California requires that children in elementary school receive at least 200 minutes of physical education every 10 days, recent monitoring has revealed poor policy compliance. Latino children are more likely to be unfit than children of other racial/ethnic groups; thus, poor compliance may disproportionately affect Latinos. So this project, using the existing Fitnessgram data on California public school fifth-grade students that include a large sampling of Latino children, will assess the association between physical education policy compliance, physical fitness, and body mass index (BMI) among Latino children through the use of mixed linear models. The results will be disseminated to local and state policy-makers to advocate for strong obesity legislation.
PowerPoint about Project
