Heather D. Gibbs, Ph.D., RD, LD

• Director, Master of Science in Dietetics and Nutrition program, KU School of Health Professions
• Associate Professor, Dietetics and Nutrition, KU School of Health Professions
• Research Project Lead, Implementation Science for Equity Center for Biomedical Research Excellence

Project Summary

Nutrition literacy is how well a person can use information about healthy eating to make healthy food choices. Most Americans eat high calorie and nutrient-poor diets that promote obesity and chronic disease. To improve the health of Americans, we must increase nutrition literacy. Americans need easy to follow and easy to access healthy eating advice so they can choose healthy eating patterns. Parents affect their child's diet in many ways, and diet patterns formed before age five years track throughout life. In this study, we propose to engage Latino parents and their young children (1-5 years of age) using our culturally tailored, bilingual (English/Spanish) mobile intervention, Nutricity. Our goals are to improve eating habits for obesity and disease prevention.

Our aims are three-fold:

1. Give a small sample of parent-child pairs access to Nutricity for three months. We will measure whether children have better eating patterns at the end of the study.
2. We will measure whether the parent-child pairs who joined the study have similar characteristics with parent-child pairs of the clinic who were not studied or who joined but did not finish; whether parent child pairs who joined the study were engaged; and whether there were other health-related improvements at the end of the study.
3. We will measure if the pediatric clinic is a good setting to study Nutricity.

As a result, we will produce a mobile program to improve child eating patterns, using few resources from clinics. If Nutricity is effective and feasible to deliver within the pediatric clinic setting, future research will evaluate the implementation of Nutricity on a larger scale.