Over the past five years the Center of Physical Activity and Nutrition at Deakin University have been running trials to test ways to make healthy eating and active play right from the start of life. This large cluster randomised controlled trial started with 560 first-time parents and their 3 to 18 month old infants. And you can read the fascinating results below. But this exciting work is also now ready for roll out, and we need you, our lovely Scoop community, to help:
About our expert:
Dr Karen Campbell is a dietitian and Associate Professor at the Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition Research, Deakin University. Karen’s research focuses on the behavioural, social and environmental influences on eating, sedentary behaviours and physical activity in infants and children, with particular emphasis on the home environment as a determinant of these behaviours. Connect with her on Twitter or visit the project’s Facebook page.
Starting out right
As you know, early intervention to promote healthy lifestyle is vital. Our Infant Program work has shown that dietary patterns at 9 months of age are already poor and that they are reflected in dietary patterns at 18 months of age – this means diet tracks. While we’ve known for a while that children’s dietary patterns predict their diet as adults, our research is internationally unique in showing the importance of infancy. Early intervention to set healthy dietary and physical activity trajectories is fundamentally important to achieving the best life outcomes for our kids. We also know that mother’s confidence to promote healthy eating and reduce screen time decreases as their kids get older – and that this is related to poorer diet and more screen time. The combination of these factors provides us with great motivation to help parents in this early phase of children’s lives!
The Infant Program Studies
We have two studies running – the Award Winning Infant Program , which ran from 3 months to 18 months of age and involved 542 families across Melbourne. The results of that study showed improved child diet and sedentary behaviours at 18months of age and also improved parent’s diet. These children are now being reassessed, with no further intervention at ages 3.5 and 5 years.
Our second study is the Infant Extend study in which we’re continuing the intervention across the challenging toddler years, until children are 3 years of age. We have funding to provide a simple mail based intervention once the group based Infant Program finishes at 18 months. But we want to do more! We’re hoping to expand our intervention (while keeping it low cost and translatable), by developing a suite of 18 video clips to support parents to get healthy eating and active play right from the start of life. These clips will build on our existing free, evidence based and independent Infant Program website which forms one part of our National Health and Medical Research Council and World Cancer Research Funded Infant Program interventions .
We need your help!
So here’s the thing. We need money to do this – and we’re being very experimental! We’re currently running a crowd funding campaign to raise the $12,500 we need to film and edit these high quality video clips. While crowd funding has been very successfully used by the Arts to raise funds, this is one of the first attempts to raise funds to support research – and we’re hoping you can help us to make this happen! Start by watching our video:
We’re doing OK – but we need your help. We’ve raised over $4,000 of our $12,500 target! But it’s all or nothing on June 17th and time is running out!
You can help us this way:
Visit our Pozible crowd funding site here to learn more. Once on the site, please click Like Us, and Share which will allow you to spread the word through your social media networks. Crowd funding needs a crowd!
Donate to this evidence based program of research that improves parent’s diet and child diet and sedentary behaviours.
Join me on Twitter to keep abreast of our work in health promotion and early life interventions – and retweet our messages.
Spread the word to others who may be interested in early childhood health about our call for help.
Editor’s comment:
So fantastic to see the use of social media in this positive way Karen. I’m off to RT and have just made my $20 tax deductible donation! What do you think lovely readers, isn’t this a great cause to lend your social media weight behind? Drop us a comment if you agree, you’ve supported or have a question for Karen.
