Healthy Home Offerings via the Mealtime Environment:HOME

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The lack of home-and family-based programs for the prevention of pediatric obesity exposes a fundamental gap in efforts to curb the prevalence of this serious public health problem. The proposed research directly involves parents in an intervention to prevent childhood obesity and builds on previous research by developing a health promotion intervention that encourages regular and nutritionally-sound meals in which families members eat together (family meals). The Pi's long-term goal is to develop effective home-based obesity prevention programs focused on the nutritional quality of foods available and served within the home. The goal of the proposed project is to develop and test the feasibility and acceptability of the Healthy Home Offerings via the Mealtime Environment (HOME) pilot program, an innovative home-based family meals intervention to prevent overweight among children. Built on a Social Cognitive Theory conceptual framework, the HOME program addresses the role and mechanism of families or households at home in the initiation, support, and reinforcement of food and beverage consumption. This community-based program aims to work with parents and children to influence positively the types of foods available in the home, the types of foods served at meals, the frequency of family meals, and television viewing during meals. The novel study is the first to develop a home-based obesity prevention program through the promotion of regular and healthful family meals. This study will entail a randomized pilot trial of the HOME program, targeting 8-10 year old children and their parent(s)/guardian(s). The study aims to determine the HOME program's feasibility and acceptability, and will test the program's ability to affect the types of foods available and served in the home and children's consumption of fruits and vegetables, fat and sugar; it will also assess weight change among children. Sixty families will be recruited via school-age childcare programs in metropolitan Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN and randomized to either an intervention or a control condition. The intervention developed in this project and the preliminary trial results, including formative and process evaluation data, will be used to inform a future full- scale and fully-powered research study. [unreadable] [unreadable]