HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Center for Children's Health Grant will Help Keep Boston Kids Active and Healthy

By Anita M. Harris
Special to the Gazette

With obesity in children now at what the U.S. surgeon general has called epidemic proportions, researchers from the School of Public Health (SPH) embarked this fall on an innovative five-year program aimed at improving the eating and exercise habits of students in the Boston public schools.

Since 1970, national studies show that the percentage of youth aged 6-14 who are overweight has doubled - from 5 percent to about 11 percent - and available evidence suggests that declining physical activity levels play a major role in this trend. Research has shown that if children remain obese into adulthood they will be at increased risk for developing illnesses like heart disease, some cancers, and diabetes.

At a time when many schools have done away with specialized health and physical education classes, "it is important to offer students of differing backgrounds and learning styles a variety of ways to gain knowledge about nutrition and exercise," said Jean Wiecha, director of the new program.

The SPH team, funded by a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control, will train teachers to integrate health curricula into regular classroom subjects like math, language arts, and social science, and evaluate the results.

Similar programs designed by team members have been shown to reduce obesity among youths in Baltimore and in four cities in Massachusetts.

In those programs, classroom teachers incorporated information about exercise and healthy eating into several lesson plans a year. For example, in a program called Planet Health, which is geared for grades six through eight, an algebra teacher emphasized the importance of eating five fruits or vegetables a day by asking students to calculate the cost of fruits and vegetables needed in planning an imaginary party. A social studies teacher assigned her students to find out how their elderly relatives had, as children, spent their leisure time. And in a program called Eat Well and Keep Moving, which is for grades four to five, students calculated the time they spent watching television versus time engaged in physical activities like sports or raking leaves - and pledged to reduce their sedentary hours.

The Boston project, conducted in partnership with the Boston public schools, is aimed at determining how the methods used in smaller school systems can best be transferred to large urban settings, Wiecha said. This fall, the researchers began working with school administrators, classroom teachers, parent-teacher associations, and community organizations to determine how to adapt the Planet Health and Eat Well and Keep Moving curricula for Boston's many and diverse socioeconomic and ethnic groups.

By 1999, the SPH team expects that some 300 teachers and up to 4,000 students in 12 middle schools will be testing two different curriculum models. Then the team will measure the effectiveness of its strategies and develop ways to disseminate its findings and methods beyond the Boston area.

The middle grades are a good time to begin educational prevention efforts, Wiecha said, because "these students are coming out of childhood. They are starting to make their own decisions about what they will eat and how they will use their time, and are interested in learning about their bodies."

The Boston project is a program of the Harvard Center for Children's Health and the Harvard Center for Health and Social Behavior. The project team, led by co-principal investigators Steven Gortmaker and Charles Deutsch, is composed of researchers, staff, and students from the SPH departments of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Health and Social Behavior, Nutrition, Maternal and Child Health, and the Division of Public Health Practice.