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Cancer Control Research

Abstract

Several national dietary guidelines have promoted the consumption of 5 to 9 servings of fruit and vegetables (F&V) every day, but children are only eating about 2.3 servings a day. Existing school based nutrition education curricula have encountered difficulties in the extent to which the educational activities likely to result in dietary change have been implemented. Interactive Multimedia provide exciting opportunities for directly reaching students and providing programs that are engaging, based on social cognitive theory, and likely to result in change. This project adapts the successful Gimme 5 classroom curriculum to interactive multimedia format. Based on previous research, Gimme 5 increases F&V availability and accessibility at home and at fast food places by modeling students' asking behaviors and encouraging parents to purchase more F&V through newsletters sent home and joint parent- child home assignments; increases students' preferences for F&V by taste-testing of proven preferred recipes, fun activities, and showing students enjoying consumption of F&V; increases students' skills in F&V preparations by sending recipes to parents and encouraging child preparation of the recipes under parent supervision; promotes goal- setting for F&V changes at alternative meals and snacks; and promotes problem solving skills for initial Change goals not attained. The strengths of interactive multimedia are incorporated by use of modeling of desired asking and food preparation behaviors by attractive peers, use fantasy in animations, encouraging skill building by presenting students with real life decisions and experiencing the consequences of their alternative decisions, tailoring of motivational messages to student outcome expectations, and tailoring of goals to child's dietary practices, preferences and desired schema for eating more F&V. Participation in this study will take approximately 8 weeks per student, or 1 school year to complete. Hypotheses will be tested in regard to dietary outcomes and psychosocial and family mediators of program outcomes. This research will be the firs test of interactive multimedia for dietary behavior change among elementary school students. The project combines the many years of expertise of the school nutrition education team at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the Multimedia Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch- Galveston with the Houston Independent School District.