| Childhood obesity isn’t a discrete issue. It’s not just a matter of what kids eat and whether or not they are active. It’s connected to everything else in a child’s world – what kind of food the family is able to bring home, whether the community provides places and opportunities for active play, cultural norms for cooking and eating, and more.
These are among the reasons why Sharon Warren Cook, professor of social work and Meeshay Williams-Wheeler, associate professor of family and consumer sciences at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, chose Halifax County for an innovative project addressing childhood obesity.
In Halifax County, North Carolina, these factors converge in a generation of children with too much fat and sugar in their food and too little physical activity. The county has the fifth highest obesity rate in the state and residents are well aware and concerned over the rural area’s lack of health-promoting resources.
“It’s a community that wants to change, to be healthy,” said Cook.
Although rural life has its own particular health challenges, childhood obesity is a problem all across North Carolina and the United States. The nation’s rate of childhood obesity has tripled in the past 30 years. It’s an especially problematic condition because it puts children at risk of potentially lifelong health problems that used to be limited to adults, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
The National Survey of Children’s Health reports that 19 percent of North Carolina children aged 10 to 17 are obese. Obesity is increasing among children in most age, gender, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic groups.
Due to the disproportionate impacts of obesity and other health diseases among African American children, there is an especially strong need to encourage physical activity and healthy eating in African American families.
One way to address those issues is by going beyond the conventional health care system to include approaches that are more integrated with the entirety of a family’s life, according to the researchers.
A process called community-based participatory research has emerged as a way to bring both education and social action to bear on health issues. It provides scientific insight into promoting health, preventing disease, and eliminating health disparities. It has become recognized as an effective way to transfer knowledge gained from evidence-based research to the communities that need it.
Cook and Williams-Wheeler went to Enfield to use this strategy to attack childhood obesity from a new direction.
Instead of working through doctors’ offices or public schools, the researchers wanted an entirely different venue. The researchers, instead, pointed their attention to a place where families would be more comfortable. In Enfield, N.C, First Baptist Church was just that kind of place.
The research team’s participatory methodology emphasized developing a close, collaborative relationship with families, the church, and community leaders with a long-term engagement and commitment to the health and well-being of children and families.
The project was motivated by the national “Let’s Move” initiative against childhood obesity, led by First Lady Michelle Obama.
Now in their third year, A&T researchers are partnering with the church to deliver some temporal good news: Better nutrition isn’t as hard – or as expensive – as you think. Getting kids more active can be as simple as providing chalk for hopscotch, ropes for jumping, and balls for kicking and chasing. And changing traditional ways and lifelong habits is easier together than alone.
The researchers started by developing relationships with the church and parents who wanted to help their children. A group of a dozen volunteers quickly grew to 30.
“Part of this is getting people to see things differently,” Dr. Cook said. “We were facing an intergenerational legacy of what good food is,” she added.
While the project focused on childhood obesity, the researchers found themselves working with parents as much as children. The parents’ enthusiasm for the project and their knowledge that they need to eat better themselves guaranteed that changes in the children’s diets would be part of their entire families’ healthier lives.
This research was funded by a three-year U.S. Department of Agriculture grant through the Evans-Allen program, one of the major sources of funding for agricultural research at A&T and other 1890 land-grant universities.
To read more about the progress of the research, click here.
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