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Fall 2005

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What's Eating American Tweens?
Battling childhood obesity using dollars and sense

—Patricia Sullivan




	Tweens Daniel Werner (son of Lisa Sullivan-Werner, a UMass Extension Family Nutrition Program leader) and Kyla and Lena Amick, (their mom, Nancy Cohen, heads UMass Amherst’s Department of Nutrition) enjoy typical after-school snacks.

HIGHLY TRAINED INVESTIGATORS NEED TO know: What’s a 13-year-old thinking when she buys a bag of chips? Two nutrition professors at UMass Amherst are using a four-year U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to answer that surprisingly slippery question and subsequently develop an educational program to prevent obesity in 11-to14-year-olds, or “tweens.”

The number of overweight kids in the United States is out of hand and growing. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, approximately 16 percent of children and adolescents (ages 6-19) were overweight in the 1999-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. An additional 31 percent of both groups were at risk for being overweight.

While fast-food companies, soda, snack, and candy makers have long strived to get inside children’s minds and wallets, serious nutritional studies lag behind. Spotting this gap, Elena Carbone, assistant professor, and Jean Anliker, associate professor in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, developed their study and intervention. They call it “Tween POWER: Preventing Obesity through Wise Expenditures of Resources.”

As co-principal investigators, these two dietitians complement each other like burgers and fries, or, in their case, yogurt and bananas. “I think we got the grant because of our creative approach to this problem,” says Carbone. “Of course, it’s scientifically sound,” adds Anliker. “It’s also multidisciplinary, which is one of the great things about our research team.”

The program involves a crack three-state team with expertise in obesity prevention, psychology, learning styles, cognitive testing, physical activity, consumer sciences, and marketing, as well as nutrition. “We also have great community involvement, which is vital,” says Carbone.

After being awarded the $800,000 U.S.D.A. grant, the team moved from planning into intensive information gathering. To understand the decision-making web tweens and their families weave when choosing foods, they asked questions including: What TV shows do you watch? What music do you like? How much of your own money do you spend on food? When and where do you eat dinner? What do you do after school? “Eating is so much more than food, as anyone who has ever been on a diet can tell you,” says Anliker.

Two kid-friendly grad students conducted one-on-one interviews with 20 tweens. Next came the cool part: The kids went to stores or fast-food restaurants and thought out loud into microcassette recorders as they made purchases. “It was kind of weird for them at first,” said interviewer Robin Cook ’06.“Some made funny faces. But then they lost their self-consciousness and were surprisingly cooperative.”

Interviewer Romina Pacheco ’06 knew she had one 12-year-old’s interest when she walked with him to the corner store to buy an after-school snack. He said to his friends, “Don’t talk to me now. Can’t you see I’m doing research?”

Early results indicate—no surprise—that taste isn’t always a top factor in tweens’ food choices. Some of their microcassette monologues include statements such as: “I’m getting Doritos because I always get Doritos.” “I’m ordering a double cheeseburger because it will really fill me up and it looks good on TV.” “I want that large Pepsi, but it’s too expensive.”

The study continued this past summer with tween focus groups. After analyzing the
responses, Anliker, Carbone, and the research team will build and launch a healthy lifestyles pilot educational program to include fun components for families such as parties and prizes.

“We have enough time with a four-year grant to gather formative data which allows us to really listen to the tweens and to use these data to inform an intervention that will reach them more effectively,” says Carbone.

Following the pilot phase, the program will expand to more tween families and results will be measured. The final step includes data synthesis and sharing the educational program with participating communities and the public.

“The corporations have been targeting tweens for years. Now it’s time for our side to learn about the food decision-making process and do something positive about it,” says Anliker. “If research and marketing can work for them, the nutrition people can do it too.”

- http://www.umass.edu/umext/nutrition/ -

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