Healthy Pals

Abstract

This study is an educational intervention focused on the central question: How can we improve the health of children in Greenville? Obesity is now a common diagnosis of many children; partly because of increasingly sedentary lifestyles, but also because of incorrect and inefficient knowledge of food consumption. Much research has been done on how meals size and creation cause an increase in obesity rates, but we identified that a large part of a child’s food intake also comes from the consumption of snacks. If snacks continue to be made up of unhealthy options like cookies and breads, fixing main meals won’t have as much an effect on the improvement of overall health. Therefore, we created a 7-week educational intervention, with the results being measured through a pre and post-test to see if students’ knowledge of healthy foods increased during the intervention. To accomplish our goal, we modeled our intervention after the Go, Slow, Woah program and the MyPlate program, and partnered with the Boys and Girls Club to conduct our research. In the end, our research was not able to be completed due to a lack of student support for the program. However, much was learned about research, time management, literary reviews, and teamwork.