Culturally Appropriate Childhood Obesity Prevention Program for Hispanic Families

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This study addresses recommendations and priorities for obesity prevention research made in the Institute of Medicine report, Preventing Childhood Obesity: Health in the Balance (Koplan et al., 2005) and in the Strategic Plan for NIH Obesity Research (NIH, 2004). These documents recommend for community-based, participatory approaches to be used to develop culturallyappropriate interventions to prevent childhood obesity that target parents to address nutrition, physical activity, and sedentary behaviors in their children. Both documents emphasize the value of exploring potential community-based prevention and treatment strategies that are culturally-appropriate and target diverse population groups, as a strategy for reducing health disparities in obesity and related consequences. This study addresses important gaps in the literature¿namely, a dearth of research on culturally-appropriate, family-based childhood obesity prevention interventions for the Hispanic population. In our formative research phase, we adapted the We Can! program to develop a family-based childhood obesity program that is tailored for Hispanic families. The new intervention was adapted to be linguistically- and culturally-appropriate for Hispanic families to incorporate cultural values, norms, and customs of the target population, and by delivering the intervention through CHP's in a community center setting. Our formative research also found that the We Can! program materials were written at a relatively high reading level and were not easily comprehended. Thus, we made the modifications with an emphasis on making, the program accessible to Spanish-speaking persons with low health literacy levels (e.g., nontechnical language, easy-to-read materials, interactive activities). The proposed study aims to demonstrate the efficacy of this culturally-tailored childhood obesity prevention intervention through a randomized controlled trial.