Advances in
eISSN: 2378-3168
Submit manuscript...
Mini Review Volume 6 Issue 4
Developing multipronged intervention protocols for childhood obesity prevention based on multi-theory model (MTM) of health behavior change: a mini review
Manoj Sharma
Verify Captcha
Regret for the inconvenience: we are taking measures to prevent fraudulent form submissions by extractors and page crawlers. Please type the correct Captcha word to see email ID.
Verify Captcha
Regret for the inconvenience: we are taking measures to prevent fraudulent form submissions by extractors and page crawlers. Please type the correct Captcha word to see email ID.
Jackson State University, USA
Correspondence: Manoj Sharma, Behavioral & Environmental Health, School of Public Health, Jackson State University, Jackson, USA
Received: April 13, 2017 | Published: April 13, 2017
Citation: Sharma M. Developing multipronged intervention protocols for childhood obesity prevention based on multi-theory model (MTM) of health behavior change: a mini review. Adv Obes Weight Manag Control. 2017;6(4):141-142 DOI: 10.15406/aowmc.2017.06.00166
Introduction
Childhood obesity is a well-established public health problem confronting the world and United States in present times. The prevalence of childhood obesity has tripled during the last three decades in the United States.1 Prevalence of childhood obesity in 2011-12 in United States was estimated at 8.1% for infants and toddlers and 16.9% for 2 to 19year old youth.2 Within United States, this problem is more severe in Mississippi. A state level study done in 2007 found that Mississippi had the highest prevalence of childhood obesity at 21.9% and overweight at 44.5%.3 More recent studies also point at this trend.4,5 Childhood obesity is associated with several short-term negative consequences such as adverse blood lipid profile, altered glucose metabolism, obstructive sleep apnea and long-term negative effects such as greater risk of hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, gall bladder disease, and osteoarthritis in adulthood.6
Sharma & Ickes6 have analyzed psychosocial determinants of childhood obesity. Some of the non-modifiable determinants of obesity that they identified were genetics, age, height, and having older siblings who were obese. The modifiable factors included physical inactivity, television watching (screen time), and nutritional behaviors and environments. In nutritional behaviors consuming polyunsaturated fatty acids, and larger portion sizes were associated with obesity while consuming adequate servings of fruits and vegetables was protective against overweight and obesity. Maternal smoking during pregnancy, lack of breast feeding, high birth weight, weight gain in first week of life, and rapid growth in infancy were other modifiable factors for overweight and obesity. Final set of modifiable factors was related to parents such as parental overweight and obesity, parental education especially maternal education level, and socio-economic status. Hence, commonly suggested modifiable public health strategies to combat childhood obesity are
- Promoting physical activity
- Limiting screen time
- Increasing fruit and vegetable intake
- Controlling portion size
- Limiting eating out
- Replacing soft drink consumption with water. There is a need to develop behavioral public health interventions to address these six behaviors.
In order to combat childhood obesity Sharma & Branscum7 have identified five types of interventions:
- School-based interventions
- After-school interventions
- Family and home-based interventions
- Community interventions
- Policy interventions.
They contend that for effectual impact a synergistic multipronged approach is needed in any community that utilizes all five modalities of interventions. There is an urgent need to develop protocols for all five types of interventions, develop and test process and impact instruments and test these protocols for efficacy using newer theories. The intervention protocols can utilize the newly proposed multi-theory model (MTM) for health behavior change.8,9 This theory breaks the behavior change into initiation and sustenance. The theory proposes that participatory dialogue in which advantages outweigh disadvantages, behavioral confidence and changes in physical environment are crucial for health behavior change and will be used to predict the five behaviors in this pilot study. For sustenance of behavior change the constructs of practice for change, emotional transformation and changes in social environment are important. The theory is very new and in its initial applications to physical activity behavior in adults,10 portion size behavior in adults,11 and sleep behavior12 has shown very good predictability. There is a lot of promise in utilizing this theory to combat childhood obesity and it behooves both researchers and practitioners to use this theory in this direction.
Acknowledgements
None.
Conflict of interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
References
- Cheryl D Fryar, Margaret D Carroll, Cynthia L Ogden. Prevalence of obesity among children and adolescents United States, trends 1963–1965 through 2011–2012. USA: National Center for Health Statistics; 2014.
- Ogden CL, Carroll MD, Kit BK, et al. Prevalence of childhood and adult obesity in the United States. JAMA. 2014;311(8):806–814.
- Singh GK, Kogan MD, van Dyck PC. Changes in state–specific childhood obesity and overweight prevalence in the United States from 2003 to 2007. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2010;164(7):598–607.
- MW Long, ZJ Ward, SC Resch, et al. State–level estimates of childhood obesity prevalence in the United States corrected for report bias. Int J Obes (Lond). 2016;40(10):1523–1528.
- Wyatt SB, Winters KP, Dubbert PM. Overweight and obesity Prevalence, consequences, and causes of a growing public health problem. Am J Med Sci. 2006;331(4):166–174.
- Manoj Sharma, Paul Branscum. Childhood obesity: Need for multipronged approach. Obesity Research Open Journal. 2014;1(1):1–4.
- Manoj Sharma, Hannah Priest Catalano, Vinayak K Nahar, et al. Using multi–theory model of health behavior change to predict portion size consumption among college students. Health Promot Perspect. 2016;6(3):137–144.
- Sharma M. Multi–theory model (MTM) for health behavior change. Webmed Central Behaviour. 2015.
- Sharma M. Theoretical foundations of health education and health promotion. 3rd ed. USA: Jones and Bartlett; 2017.
- Nahar VK, Sharma M, Catalano HP, et al. Testing multi–theory model (MTM) in predicting initiation and sustenance of physical activity behavior among college students. Health Promot Perspec. 2016;6(2):58–65.
- Manoj Sharma, Melinda J Ickes. Psychosocial determinants of childhood and adolescent obesity. Journal of Social, Behavioral and Health Sciences. 2008;2(1):33–49.
- Knowlden AP, Sharma M, Nahar VK, et al. Using multi–theory model of health behavior change to predict adequate sleep behavior. Fam Community Health. 2017;40(1):56–61.
©2017 Sharma. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and build upon your work non-commercially.