Reducing Television Viewing To Prevent Obesity in Hispanic Preschool Children

Obesity has been linked to the development of multiple cancers, and to poorer prognoses and higher mortality rates for certain pediatric and adult cancers. Preventing obesity is therefore a major strategy to prevent new cases of cancer and to decrease cancer related morbidity and mortality. In the US, childhood obesity is on the rise. Since childhood obesity strongly tracks into adulthood this epidemic among children greatly increases the risk of obesity and presumably cancer in adulthood. As a result, preventing childhood obesity has been selected as a major public health goal to reduce the risk and sequelae of obesity and cancer in the US. Moreover, television (TV) viewing has been identified as a major risk factor for childhood obesity and US children spent more time watching TV than any other activity except sleep. TV viewing contributes to excess weight gain by decreasing physical activity and increasing caloric intake. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has issued national guidelines for parents to limit their children's total entertainment media time to no more than 1 to 2 hours of quality programming per day for children greater than 2 years of age. Low-income and minority children were at greater risk for exceeding this recommendation. Few published interventions have been successful in decreasing TV viewing in children and only one was successful among preschool children. This intervention, "Fit 5 Kids" (i.e. fit by age 5 years), was a preschool curriculum designed to decrease TV viewing via age-appropriate lessons taught to the children by research staff. The curriculum also included a take-home component consisting of a newsletter with ideas for parent (for this grant, defined as the adult most responsible for the child's care, usually the mother) and child activities that complemented the school lesson plans. Although most behavioral interventions for preschoolers target parents rather than children, this curriculum was one of the few successful