Switch What You Do, View, and Chew

SWITCH What You Do, View, and Chew is a three-fold program that targets known risk factors for obesity for children of ages 8-10 years. It encourages children to increase their physical activity, decrease television time, and increase fruit and vegetable consumption to provide long-term healthy lifestyles and prevent obesity. SWITCH incorporates families, schools and communities and encourages equal participation from all sectors. The program addresses three known health risk factors contributing to obesity: physical activity, television time, and the consumption of fruits and vegetables.

There are four phases to the program. The first involves obtaining baseline measurements of eating, physical activity and screen time habits. The second phase supports incremental changes in the three target behaviors and provides reinforcement by self-rewarded points. Children who bring their weekly logs to school are rewarded in front of their classmates. The third phase provides families with shopping and mealtime planners to encourage healthier eating habits. The fourth stage teaches behaviors that will ideally be maintained throughout life. At the end of the project there was a gathering to celebrate the hard work and success by all sectors involved.

To increase healthy lifestyles in children ages 8-10 years old by increasing physical activity and vegetable and fruit consumption and decreasing time spent in front of the television in order to prevent childhood obesity.

A randomized controlled trial was conducted at a school to assess the effectiveness of the SWITCH initiative. Participants were evaluated based on program objectives at 3 checkpoints throughout the study timeline: before implementation of the intervention (“baseline”), immediately after intervention (“post-intervention”), and 6 months after. Data was provided for 1,288 children in grades 3-5, who were separated by school into a control group (5 schools) and an experimental group (5 schools in which children were exposed to aspects of the SWITCH).

Post-intervention, large effects were observed in the areas of parent-reported decreased television screen time per week, parent-reported increased fruit and vegetable consumption per day, and pedometer-measured increased physical activity per day. Decreased parent-reported screen time and increased parent-reported servings per week of fruits and vegetables among participants in school groups exposed to SWITCH were statistically significant (p-value < 0.05). The child-reported increase in fruit and vegetable consumption in experimental schools was marginally significant (p-value < 0.06). Six-months post-intervention, the experimental schools had maintained less parent-reported screen time and higher parent-reported and child-reported consumption of fruits and vegetables (all p-values < 0.05).