Cancer Control Research
7R01CA068398-03
Haire-Joshu, Debra
ALTERING DIETARY PATTERNS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN PARENTS
AbstractDESCRIPTION: This study will develop a dietary change program for African
American parents that promotes adherence to NCI dietary guidelines and is
implemented through Parent As Teachers (PAT), a national parent education
program. This program will encourage parents to model healthy eating to
their children. The dietary change program will build upon two recognized
strengths of African American families; kin networks and external social
support networks. The primary evaluation outcomes will be to: reduce
dietary fat intake to an average of 30 percent of energy or less; increase
fiber containing foods in the diets of parents to five or more daily
servings of vegetables (including beans and peas) and fruits in parents.
The impact of the program on intermediate outcomes will be measured by
changes in dietary patterns that describe behavioral components associated
with lowering fat in the diet, nutrition related knowledge, and attitudes.
The investigators will train parent educators to implement the dietary
change program through PAT curriculum and evaluate the impact of the
training on the parent educators. Parent educators will be trained to teach
parents diet-related skills through a variety of materials (nutrition
workbook, newsletters), and across settings (home visits and group
meetings)which promote social support (parent-kin involvement).
A quasi-experimental, nested cohort design will be used to evaluate the
impact of the program on 1440 African American parents for 12 PAT sites
located throughout St. Louis city and county. Process evaluation will
include assessment of: session content of five individual home visits, the
distribution of newsletters, parent and extended kin participation and
session content of five group meetings, and parent perspective of
satisfaction with the program.
The program will be delivered through PAT, an agency well supported and
enthusiastically accepted by African American parents as demonstrated by
high participation rates of its clientele. A second strength is the
potential to disseminate the curriculum developed for the proposed study on
a national level through 1770 PAT-affiliated sites across 45 states.
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