The Child Health Initiative for Lifelong Eating and Exercise study seeks to encourage children at a young age to take this message to heart.

by Lauren Cruse

Eat healthy and exercise regularly is a message heard almost daily, but sometimes easier said than done. Knowing how hard it can be as an adult to live by these words, communicating this message to 1,600 three- and four-year-olds from rural communities throughout New Mexico is a challenge.

That’s the challenge taken on by Sally Davis and her research team, who are currently in the third year of a National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) funded, five-year study called Child Health Initiative for Lifelong Eating and Exercise (CHILE).

Davis is a professor and chief of the UNM Department of Pediatrics’ Division of Prevention and Population Sciences and is the director of the UNM Prevention Research Center (PRC). She and her team of prevention researchers have been working for the last two years on developing an intensive, multidisciplinary, trans-community obesity prevention program for three and four-year-old American Indian and Hispanic children from 16 Head Start programs in rural New Mexico.

For this third year, the research team is implementing the CHILE program at Head Start schools and evaluating the effectiveness of early intervention by conducting interviews and measurements, such as the heights and weights of each child.

The 16 Head Start programs are located throughout New Mexico, including Estancia, Llano Quemado, Santa Rosa, Tucumcari, West Las Vegas, Isleta, Laguna, Taos, Adelino, Bernalillo, Espanola, Mora, Socorro, Acoma, San Felipe, and Santo Domingo.

Head Start is a federally funded preschool program for low-income families and was established to serve children from birth to four years of age in recognition of the mounting evidence that the earliest years matter a great deal to children’s growth and development.

Davis says in the past, studies like CHILE have focused on children in elementary school and have found they would benefit more from the health initiatives if approached even earlier.

“We are seeing more and more children with type 2 diabetes, which was previously only seen in adults,” says Davis. “We need to determine what the best early interventions are to prevent this from happening. Prevention research is very important and early childhood intervention is extremely important to reducing disease.”

The study is straightforward in its message and uses several key points to illustrate evidence-supported healthy choices, including increasing fruits and vegetables, increasing whole grains, reducing high-fat food, reducing sugar, instituting portion control, exercising one hour a day, and reducing time spent in front of the television and computer screen.

For these messages to have an impact on children, the CHILE team is involving the families, Head Start teachers and staff, grocery store owners, health care providers, and other adults from the communities by providing trainings, curricula, ideas for at-home activities, family nights, and community events.

With the grocery store component, each local grocery store is displaying labels to identify food recommended by CHILE nutritionists and recipes to help families prepare healthy meals at home.

“Our goal in providing these opportunities like the grocery store food sections is that it will make it easier for the communities to sustain a healthy lifestyle that is attainable and affordable,” says Davis. “We would like each community to continue the program even after the research is completed.”

The heights and weights of each child will be recorded for the last time in May 2010 and other data will be evaluated for final results. Once the study is completed, Davis says the CHILE program will have an opportunity to become a dissemination project through the PRC where other states and Head Start programs can use CHILE as a health initiative model.

Davis has more than 30 years experience conducting prevention research in partnership with under-represented populations, especially in rural communities. She says that working with rural communities is her passion since these communities are often overlooked.

“If we’re going to improve quality of life and reduce health disparities, we need research that will show us what interventions work best, in what circumstances and how to sustain those programs over time,” says Davis. “It is exciting to know that we are contributing to a small, but growing body of knowledge of ‘what works’ in obesity prevention.”

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