Abstract
BackgroundGarden-based interventions have the potential to impact young children’s health in a number of ways, including enhancing dietary intake, increasing outdoor physical activity, diversifying the gut microbiome, and promoting general wellbeing. A number of recent systematic reviews have either included or focused on garden-based interventions for young children. However, most prior reviews including young children only focus on one health outcome or one setting, making a full summary of prior research assessing the impact of garden-based interventions nonexistent. As such, this umbrella systematic review aims to synthesize the literature on health outcomes of garden-based interventions for young children.MethodsThis protocol outlines the systematic steps we will take to conduct an umbrella review on health-related outcomes of garden-based interventions in children younger than 6 years of age. We will systematically search PubMed, PsycINFO, ERIC, CINAHL, Embase, Scopus, OVID-Agricola, and CAB Direct, including all systematic reviews and meta-analyses fitting the pre-determined inclusion/exclusion criteria. We will double screen at each phase of the review: title/abstract, full text, data extraction, and quality appraisal. We will assess the quality of included reviews using A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR 2). Based on the potential for stark variability in what how reviews report child health outcomes, we will analyze the reviews both narratively and quantitatively, reporting summary of findings tables and iteratively mapping the results. This protocol aligns with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocols statement (PRISMA-P).DiscussionThis umbrella review aims to summarize the role that garden-based interventions play in health promotion for young children. We will focus on a number of diverse child health outcomes in an effort to comprehensively synthesize the evidence to inform future garden-based interventions, research, and policy.Systematic review registrationPROSPERO CRD42019106848
Highlights
Garden-based interventions have the potential to impact young children’s health in a number of ways, including enhancing dietary intake, increasing outdoor physical activity, diversifying the gut microbiome, and promoting general wellbeing
Skelton et al Systematic Reviews (2019) 8:310 reviews have primarily focused on single health outcomes [9,10,11,12], leaving large gaps in what is known about the holistic health and wellbeing impacts of gardening programs for young children
Search terms We will search the abovementioned electronic databases using database-specific controlled vocabulary and key terms. We developed this search strategy using terms for gardening and young children that have been utilized in previous reviews [8, 23, 24, 28] as well as additional terms that were selected to capture the breadth of the body of literature
Summary
Garden-based interventions have the potential to impact young children’s health in a number of ways, including enhancing dietary intake, increasing outdoor physical activity, diversifying the gut microbiome, and promoting general wellbeing. Most prior reviews including young children only focus on one health outcome or one setting, making a full summary of prior research assessing the impact of garden-based interventions nonexistent. Garden-based interventions have the potential to improve a wide range of child health outcomes, including enhancing dietary intake, increasing outdoor physical activity, diversifying the gut microbiome, and promoting general wellbeing. This may be due, in part, to the potential of garden-based interventions to promote healthy eating and physical activity, while enriching children with food origin. Few review articles have considered and assessed diverse child health outcomes within the same article
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