Healthy Youth Places: A Program to Promote Nutrition and Physical Activity in Adolescents

The Healthy Youth Places project will test if an intervention strategy that implements school environmental change, with both adult leader and youth participation, will influence and maintain adolescent fruit and vegetable consumption and physical activity.

The study will assess the effects of school environment and curriculum interventions promoting fruit and vegetable (F&V) consumption, physical activity (PA), and their environmental determinants. The project will involve goal-setting and efficacy-building interventions designed to develop the skills and group efficacy of both adult school personnel and students. The adult-based interventions are designed to change the school environments through a school coalition assisted by a local coordinator. The youth interventions involve the participation of students in the processes of building the local health behavior environments and target both school lunch and after-school activity environments.

The project encourages adult and youth participation in the process of planning and implementing environmental change in targeted adolescent physical and social environments (school lunch place, after-school program place). Environmental change is defined as implemented practices, programs, and policies that promote critical elements (connection, autonomy, skill-building, healthy fruit and vegetable and physical activity norms). These critical elements are social environmental processes of behavior change.

Sixteen schools will be randomly assigned to either the experimental or the control (no treatment) condition. The health behavior of adolescents will be assessed during the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. Measurement of F&V and PA behaviors are the primary outcomes and will be assessed by self-report and verified by objective measures of school lunch purchases and physical activity monitoring. The impact of the program on personal, environmental, and behavioral determinants of F&V and PA will also be measured.