African-American girls may soon get a healthy dose of reality through a web-based program designed to encourage healthy food and physical activity choices.
Using characters and situations that model real life, comic strips from the “Food, Fun, and Fitness Internet Program for Girls” were created by researchers from the USDA, ARS, Children’s Nutrition Research Center, Baylor College of Medicine.
The researchers decided to focus on African-American girls because of the high prevalence of obesity in the African-American community. According to the Office of Minority Health, four out of five African-American women are overweight or obese.
The researchers found in a preliminary study with 78 African-American girls ages eight to 10 that the program helped to increase physical activity and the consumption of fruits and vegetables.
In the preliminary 8-week study, participants set food and physical activity goals each week after reading the comics.
Now, the researchers hope to repeat the study on a larger scale by testing the program with 400 girls.
The comic strips focus on the characters of six young African-American girls who have different physical and personality traits.
“What we tried to do is make the characters as real as possible so the girls participating in the study could identify with one or more characters,” said Deborah Thompson, one of the program’s creators, a USDA/ARS scientist and assistant professor of pediatrics at BCM.
Thompson said using an interactive program was more appealing to young girls than learning in a classroom setting.
The researchers strived to make their message exciting. Each comic strip ends with a “cliffhanger,” where the character faces a dilemma. For example, one strip may end with a character deliberating whether or not to eat fruits and vegetables that day.
The participant then chooses what the character should do from a few options, and the character reveals how she solves the problem the following week.
Thompson said the program emphasizes skills such as decision-making, asking and negotiation. Because the program was volunteer-based, participants were not required to finish watching all of the comic strips. However, Thompson said the program had a very low dropout rate.
The larger study the team is now planning will evaluate the long-term effects of the program on maintaining healthy eating and physical activity behaviors.
“By addressing food and physical activity behaviors early in life, we have the opportunity to establish healthy behaviors that hopefully a girl can continue the rest of her life,” Thompson said.
The researchers also want to develop a version of the program for Hispanic girls.
