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School-based program to combat obesity 'feasible'

The national Let’s Go! 5-2-1-0 curriculum aimed at improving BMI and promoting healthy habits among children in schools was feasible, and future projects using the program could include pre- and postintervention quizzes and involve elements from outside the school environment, according to data published in the Journal of Primary Care and Community Health.

Although the results of the study showed that the curriculum produced no significant change in behavior, the researchers noted their results may have been due to the small sample size.

“The Let’s Go! 5-2-1-0 program has been implemented in many school and community settings in the United States to prevent and treat obesity,” Brian A. Lynch, MD, of the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues wrote. “The curriculum, developed as part of the national Let’s Go! Program at Maine Medical Center, is available without cost through the program website. The key daily messages of the program are for children to eat at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables, limit recreational screen time to 2 or fewer hours, participate in at least 1 hour of physical activity and to ingest 0 sugar-containing drinks, including soda, juice and sports drinks.”

To test the impact of the Let’s Go 5-2-1-0 program on children in elementary school, the researchers conducted a cluster randomized controlled field trial, including eight classrooms of second- and third-grade students. Half of the classrooms were provided with the 5-2-1-0 program over a 4-month period.

The researchers examined health behavior through self-reported fruit, vegetable and sugary beverage intake, and screen time among 51 participating children. They also reported physical activity through a pedometer and BMI.

According to the researchers, there were no statistical difference in improvement of healthy habits, BMI or physical activity in the classrooms provided with the 5-2-1-0 program compared with the control group. In addition, the researchers reported that the intervention and control sites were in different classrooms, and factors such as teacher enthusiasm, socioeconomic differences and individual traits could have affected habits. They also noted that pedometers had been misplaced or broken by the children on 36 occasions during either the pre- or poststudy step measurement period.

“The ultimate goal of projects like this is to identify feasible, reproducible and effective pediatric obesity intervention components for dissemination and implementation in education and health care environments,” Lynch and colleagues wrote. “Future projects using 5-2-1-0 should use some lessons learned from our project, including using pre- and post-intervention quizzes to assess health habits knowledge retention, involving the environments the child participates in outside of the school; using research-grade pedometers or accelerometers for measuring activity data collection, and recruiting larger samples to ensure adequate statistical power.” – by Jason Laday

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.