Project F-EAT: Families and Eating and Activity in Teens

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Project F-EAT (Families and Eating and Activity in Teens) will explore how the familial and home environment of adolescents is related to adolescent weight-related outcomes. More specifically, Project F-EAT will collect parental reports of the food and physical activity environments and weight culture (e.g. dieting and weight norms) within the context of the home. These parental reports will be linked to adolescents’ weight status, body image, weight control practices, dietary intake, and physical activity, which are being collected as part of another study. Parents or other caregivers of 2400 ethnically and socio-economically diverse adolescents from Minneapolis/St. Paul will be surveyed by mail. Surveys will be conducted in English, Spanish, and Hmong in accordance with the needs of the targeted population. To enhance response rates and ensure the inclusion of parents who can not read (particularly from the Hmong population), a telephone survey option will be offered to parents who do not respond the mailed survey after several attempts. Efforts will be made to collect data from both parents thus expanding upon the familial literature, which to date has focused primarily on mothers. Project F-EAT will build upon earlier study waves of Projects EAT (I and II) and be seamlessly integrated with the currently funded Project EAT-III study, which is collecting survey and anthropometric data from adolescents and environmental data on peer, school, and neighborhood characteristics. Project F-EAT will complement this ecological perspective by providing parental data on the familial and home environment. Few studies have taken a multi-level approach simultaneously examining multiple layers of influences on weight status, dietary intake, physical activity, body image, and weight control behaviors in adolescents. A rich understanding of how variables from individual contexts and different levels of the environment (family, peer, school, and neighborhood) interact to influence different aspects of weight-related health is critical to the development of effective multi-level interventions for young people. Project F-EAT will combine synergistically with Project EAT-III to produce far more knowledge than would be possible with either study on its own. Project F-EAT will provide a knowledge base at a time when families, health providers, schools, and communities are struggling with how best to help adolescents from diverse backgrounds make healthy eating and physical activity choices, avoid unhealthy weight control practices, and prevent both eating disorders and obesity.