Abstract
Despite the importance of healthful dietary choices in combating the childhood obesity epidemic, neither primary and secondary schools nor medical schools provide adequate nutrition education. In 2005, two medical students at the University of North Carolina started the Improving Meals and Physical Activity in Children and Teens (IMPACT) program, which utilized a peer-educator model to engage medical students and high school students in teaching 4th graders about healthy eating and physical activity. Over the years, medical student leaders of IMPACT continued the program, orienting the curriculum around the 5-2-1-0 Let’s Go campaign, aligning the IMPACT curriculum with North Carolina state curricular objectives for 4th graders and engaging and training teams of health professional students to deliver the program. The IMPACT project demonstrates how medical and other health professional students can successfully promote nutrition and physical activity education for themselves and for children through community-based initiatives. Ongoing efforts are aimed at increasing family participation in the curriculum to maximize changes in eating and physical activity of IMPACT participants and ensuring sustainability of the organization by engaging health professional student participants in continuing to improve the program.
Highlights
Rates of childhood obesity have tripled in recent decades with estimates that 30% of American children will be obese by 2030 if the epidemic is not stopped [1]
While there was no significant difference in the change in body mass index (BMI) percentile for age between the intervention and control groups (−1% in the intervention students compared to control students; P = 0.59), in a difference-in-differences analysis students in the intervention group were more likely to know how many servings of fruits and vegetables they should eat (+20% compared with controls; P = 0.01) and reported eating more fruits and vegetables (+0.85 servings/day compared with controls; P = 0.05)
All P values are for the interaction term between the outcome and the presence of the intervention in a linear regression model adjusted for sex, age, baseline value of the variable, and BMI percentile, except in the case where BMI percentile itself is the outcome [12]
Summary
Rates of childhood obesity have tripled in recent decades with estimates that 30% of American children will be obese by 2030 if the epidemic is not stopped [1]. As a former high school teacher (Avik Chatterjee) and a registered dietitian with training in public health Muth), both saw the potential for a school-based intervention to improve eating behaviors [9, 10] and recognized the power of peer teaching to improve health behaviors among children [11]. Together they developed a healthy eating and physical activity education curriculum for elementary school students led by high school students. They named this curriculum IMPACT—Improving Meals and Physical Activity in Children and Teens
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