Abstract
Objective: To determine intervention needs and to gather stakeholder input regarding healthy eating promotion for youth members served at a Boys & Girls Club in Rochester, Minnesota. Design: Mixed-methods design informed by community-based participatory research principles. Setting and Method: Young people completed a dietary habits questionnaire and height and weight measure-ments. Focus groups gathered stakeholder – Boys & Girls Club members, staff, caregivers – perspectives on opportunities to improve children’s healthy eating through the club setting. Content analysis identified major themes in informants’ accounts. Results: Participants identified individual and environmental barriers to healthy eating and opportunities to reduce barriers at this Boys & Girls Club site. Few children met basic nutritional guidelines related to fruit, vegetable, milk and water consumption, and limiting consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, and nearly half were overweight/obese. Stakeholders expressed interest in healthy eating promotion and identified multiple individual-level, interpersonal and environmental opportunities to promote healthier eating through the Boys & Girls Club site. Conclusion: Findings build on a growing literature indicating afterschool programmes are uniquely positioned to address health disparities related to paediatric nutrition and obesity, and can be used to inform the design of a multi-layered intervention to address the complexities influencing dietary quality and obesity among diverse and underserved youth.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 914-931 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Health Education Journal |
Volume | 79 |
Issue number | 8 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 1 2020 |
Keywords
- Afterschool programmes
- childhood obesity prevention
- community-based participatory research
- health disparities
- healthy eating
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health