Leveraging Cultural Health Beliefs and Actions to Improve Latinx Family Wellness (RPA Pilot/ Seed Project)

Latinx children tend to become overweight at younger ages compared to non-Latinx Black and White children. Obesity in childhood is likely to continue into adulthood, leading to significant complex healthcare needs. Latinx families experience a range of challenges including accessing care, language barriers, low education, food insecurity, and lack of health insurance, which further intensify the risk of childhood obesity. Childhood is an opportune time to intervene in obesity because behaviors that are developed during this time can have long-lasting effects and disrupt trajectories of obesity. This proposal aims to test the feasibility (i.e., participant acceptance, adherence, and retention) of a telehealth family-oriented intervention “AyUDA Virtual” (Aprender y Utilizar Decisiones Apreciables—Learning and Utilizing Significant Choices). The culturally tailored, two-arm adapted intervention seeks to engage Latinx parents in healthy feeding and lifestyle practices for their children 2-5 years old, thereby reducing early childhood overweight and obesity. We will use concepts of the Social-Ecological Framework for Obesity among Latinx, and the Social Learning Theory emphasizing the importance of observing, modeling, and imitating behaviors. Our approach includes a community engagement partnership with one clinic that serves a great number of Latinx families with 2-5 aged children in Central Kentucky (General Pediatric Clinic-Clinica Amiga). We are proposing an experimental RCT design to test a two-arm intervention (a telehealth deep level messaging about cultural foods and beliefs versus a traditional educational culturally tailored intervention) in a sample of 50 Latinx families who will be followed for six months after the intervention. Moreover, we will explore short-term changes of the intervention on dietary behavior changes and anthropometric measurements among family members. The feasibility study will inform effect sizes that will be used to estimate statistical power for a future R01 on Community Level Interventions to Improve Minority Health and Reduce Health Disparities (NIH).