This article summarizes obesity prevention practices and environments within Head Start, the United States’ largest federally-funded early childhood education program. On the basis of survey data, researchers found that most Head Start programs report doing more to support healthy eating and gross motor activity than required by federal performance standards in these areas.
The purpose of the supplement is to present recent findings from RWJF grantees funded under the Healthy Eating Research and Active Living Research programs, as well as from RWJF’s Bridging the Gap program and Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. Supplement content focuses primarily on adolescent obesity prevention and the need for More
This paper documents the reliability of a new coding tool developed to evaluate the quality of school wellness policies. The 96-item coding tool assesses seven goal areas, and each of these goal areas was scored on the dimensions of comprehensiveness and strength. To evaluate reliability, researchers from four states coded a sample of 60 policies More
The Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004 mandated that school districts participating in any federally reimbursed school meal programs develop a local school wellness policy by the beginning of the 2006-07 school year. This brief, published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, summarizes key results from early research on the implementation of these More
The American Journal of Preventive Medicine (AJPM) published proceedings from a November 2007 workshop on “Measures of the Food and Built Environments.” The workshop was co-sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Cancer Institute; the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research; the Eunice Kennedy Shriver More
Schools have an unparalleled opportunity to promote children’s health by creating an environment in which children eat healthy foods, engage in regular physical activity, and learn life-long skills for healthy eating and active living. In this article, authors discuss the role of schools in obesity prevention efforts, current issues in schools’ food and physical activity More
This report summarizes the results of a survey assessing the nutrition and physical activity environments for 2- to 5-year old children in licensed child-care facilities in California, including child-care centers and homes, and state preschool and Head Start program sites. Researchers found that child-care sites that participated in the Child and Adult Care Food Program More
This paper documents the effectiveness of the federal mandated Local Wellness Policy on 45 rural elementary schools in Colorado. Using baselines and follow-up surveys conducted up to one year after the Local Wellness Policy was implemented, researchers found that opportunities for physical activity did not change substantively. Interviews of sources revealed several barriers in improving More
This project seeks to determine the extent to which a successful state-sponsored program to improve the activity and nutrition environments of schools can be adapted successfully for child care centers. Investigators will evaluate the state-sponsored policy intervention that will begin in Montgomery County (Ohio) child care centers in April 2009. This natural experiment is timed More
There are 8.6 million preschool-aged children enrolled in child-care facilities in the United States. The licensing regulations for these facilities in the areas of nutrition, physical activity, and media use (e.g., television, videos, computers) show that there are many potential opportunities to prevent obesity among these children.
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