Food for Thought: Virtual Home-Based Family Interventions to Improve Nutrition Behaviors
Condition: Behavior, Health; Obesity, Childhood
MeSH terms: Pediatric Obesity
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      A randomized controlled trial enrolling 123 parent-infant dyads (English or Spanish speaking)
      comparing a virtual video Teaching Kitchen Outreach Program (TKO) with weekly grocery
      delivery (comparator group), to Healthier Families, COVID Edition (intervention group) which
      includes TKO plus a 12-week virtual health coaching intervention aimed at supporting family
      goal setting and behavior change including topics such as nutrition and physical activity.
    

Detailed description: 
      The aim of this work is to conduct a randomized controlled trial to test the effect of two
      evidenced based programs (Healthier Families and Teaching Kitchen Outreach (TKO) adapted to a
      virtual platform on improving family health.

      Both the intervention and comparator condition receive up to 12 weekly short (about 2-3
      minutes) Teaching Kitchen Outreach (TKO) videos. Recipe specific groceries are delivered to
      participants' homes by a third party grocery delivery company, and are available for pickup
      at a central location(s). These recipes reflect foods that can be purchased with SNAP and WIC
      and include tested meals and snacks that were developed and evaluated in person in Parks and
      Recreation after-school programming (Heerman W, Elsakary Y, Sommer E, Escarfuller J, Barkin
      S. Assessing the Scale and Spread of an Experiential Teaching Kitchen in After-School
      Programming Among School-Aged Children) through the long-standing Nashville Collaborative
      partnership (https://pediatrics.vumc.org/nashville-collaborative). Over more than a decade,
      the Nashville Collaborative has developed and tested programs together to improve health and
      wellness and reduce childhood obesity in the local community.

      Those randomized to the intervention condition receive a 12-weekly health coach via a virtual
      platform (such as Zoom, FaceTime, or What's App) to provide an adapted version of the
      previously tested Healthier Families program. Adaptations include: shortening each session to
      30 minutes and delivering the programming via a virtual platform. The health coach provides
      the Healthier Families modules to individual child-parent pairs. Any use of Zoom for
      participant participation will use a version of Zoom procured through Vanderbilt. The virtual
      version of Healthier Families was adapted from prior research in the Growing Right Onto
      Wellness (GROW) trial that worked with over 600 parent-child dyads and demonstrated a
      statistically significant effect on health behavior change (Barkin SL, Heerman WJ, Sommer EC,
      Martin NC, Buchowski MS, Schlundt D, Po'e EK, Burgess LE, Escarfuller J, Pratt C, Truesdale
      KP, Stevens J. Effect of a Behavioral Intervention for Underserved Preschool-Age Children on
      Change in Body Mass Index: A Randomized Clinical Trial).
    

Intervention name(s): Healthier Families, COVID Edition; Teaching Kitchen Outreach
Intervention type(s): Behavioral; Behavioral
Intervention description(s): Families randomized to this arm with receive12-weekly health coaching calls virtually with their family with topics such as nutrition, physical activity, sleep, and media use.; Families receiving this intervention will recipe 11-weekly video recipes and groceries delivered to their door.
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Double (Investigator, Outcomes Assessor)
Primary purpose: Prevention