VERMONT AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION AND UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT EXTENSION
Annual Report 2015

Program Goal Area: Childhood Obesity

  Harvey, Jean   Burn and earn: Incentivizing physical activity in college freshman
  • Physical activity has been identified as an important behavior to help prevent the development of overweight/obesity and associated conditions including diabetes, cariovascular disease, and metabolic syndrome.

    Harvey, Jean   What do Men Really Want?: A Crowdsourcing Approach to Understand Weight Loss Behavior in Men

  • The purpose of this study is to determine how to better engage men in weight loss and obesity treatment programs.

    Heiss, Sarah   Pursuasion, dieticians, and sponsors in the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics

  • The goal was to identify the types of messages exchanged between dieticians and food industry representatives and evaluate how these messages help or hinder the respective organizations’ missions.

    Johnson, R.   Web-based training in digital imaging to measure fruit and vegetable consumption in schools

  • Accurate state-of-the-art methods are needed to measure children's fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption. Our research team used technology to develop a feasible, reliable and valid method to assess children's FV consumption during school lunch.

    Johnson, R.   Acceptance of Reformulated Flavored Milk in Schools

  • Most children do not consume the recommended amounts of milk. We measured children’s milk acceptance as milk formulations changed due to changes in USDA school meal regulations. Milk offerings were limited to low-fat or fat-free unflavored white milk and if flavored, fat-free.

    Johnson, R.   Evaluation Project of the American Heart Association Teaching Gardens Pilot Program

  • The purpose of this research was to evaluate the impact of the American Heart Association’s Teaching Gardens program on school children’s preferences, self-efficacy, food systems learning (FSL), gardening skills, and social norms with regards to the consumption of fruit and vegetables.

    Kolodinsky, Jane   Community Behavioral Health Pilot

  • Chittenden County was selected as a pilot community in a nationwide community behavioral health research project to better understand how community leaders use federal and state data sets to inform their programs and practices related to substance abuse, mental health, and other issues.

    Kolodinsky, Jane   Nationwide Evaluation of USDA Farm to School Grants

  • In collaboration with PEER Associates, this work evaluates the USDA Farm to School grant program. Farm to School is an important part of Vermont education and agriculture and understanding its effect will inform better practices in Vermont

    Kolodinsky, Jane   Innovative Community Supported Agriculture Cost-Offset Intervention to Prevent Childhood Obesity

  • Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) with a cost-offset is an innovative approach to increasing consumer access to and consumption of fresh produce, thereby lowering obesity prevalance.

    Kolodinsky, Jane   Community and Public Safety Dashboard

  • Chittenden County was selected as an "Innovation Community" to develop an early warning system to track indicators related to community health an dpublic safety addressing opiate abuse, mental health and law enforcement challenges in the greater Burlington community.

    Sun, Tao   To eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper?

  • Testing the relationship between meal proportions and obesity. Testing the valilidity of beliefs that eating a large breakfast and small dinner will result in keeping fit and losing weight.

    Trubek, Amy   Learning to Cook and Developing Food Agency: An Assessment of Deweyan Pedagogy

  • We are developing a concept of "food agency"-a measure of an individual's ability to set and achieve food-related goals in life-and the hypothesis that an experiential, cooking-based pedagogy currently employed at UVM promotes the development of this type of agency. We are testing this concept with people from rural locations in Vermont and urban areas in the Northeast with the aim to improve food and health related interventions in schools and communities.