Diet ModificationNCT03923491
A Home-based Intervention to Improve the Diet Quality of Preschoolers
A study testing Healthy Feeding, Healthy Eating and Reading Readiness in people with Diet Modification, run by University of Rhode Island at 1 site in United States.
Trial summary
U.S. children eat too little fruits and vegetables and whole grains, and too many energy dense foods, dietary behaviors associated with increased morbidity from cardiovascular diseases. Read more about this study
- Who is it for?
- Ages 18 to 95 yearsHealthy volunteers can take part
- Conditions the study is for
- Diet Modification
- What is being tested?
- Healthy Feeding, Healthy Eating and Reading Readiness
- Type of treatment
- Lifestyle or therapy programme
- Could I receive a placebo?
- No, everyone receives an active treatment
- How many people
- 63 participants
- Where
- 1 siteUnited States
- Study dates
- 24 Jul 2019to 12 Apr 2021
- Phase
- Interventional
- Are there results?
- Yes, posted in the registrySummary in the doctors' view
Key requirements
Who can take part, as listed by the sponsor. Only the study team can confirm whether you are eligible, so take this list to your doctor.
- Ages 18 to 95 years
- All sexes
- Healthy volunteers accepted
- Adult, Older adult
Who may be able to join
- Speak English or Spanish
- Have a child between 2- 5 years of age
- Live with their child most of the time
- Have a phone that is able to video-record
- Be willing to have evening meals video recorded in the home
Who cannot join
- Has a diagnosed feeding disorder, dietary restrictions, or medical condition that impacts how they feed their child.
Trial locations and contacts
1 site in 1 country.
United States1 site
University of Rhode Island
Kingston, Rhode Island, 02881
About this study
Official title: A Home-based Video and Motivational Interviewing Intervention to Improve Preschoolers Diet Quality and Parental Food Parenting Practices
U.S. children eat too little fruits and vegetables and whole grains, and too many energy dense foods, dietary behaviors associated with increased morbidity from cardiovascular diseases. Parents play a key role in shaping their child's diet and best practices suggest that parents should involve children in food preparation, offer, model and encourage a variety of healthy foods. In addition, while parents help to shape food preferences, not all children respond in the same way and certain appetitive traits, such as satiety responsiveness (sensitivity to internal satiety signals), food responsiveness (sensitivity to external food cues), and enjoyment of food may help explain some of these differences. Prior interventions among preschool aged children to improve their diet have not used a holistic approach that fully targets the home food environment, by focusing on food quality, food preparation, and positive feeding practices while acknowledging a child's appetitive traits. This proposal will build upon pre-pilot work to develop and pilot-test the feasibility, acceptability and preliminary efficacy of a novel home-based intervention. The proposed 6-month intervention, will include 3 monthly home visits by a community health worker (CHW) trained in motivational interviewing, that include in-home cooking demos. In between visits, parents will receive tailored text-messages 2x/wk. and monthly mailed tailored materials. During the last 3 months CHW phone calls will replace the home visits. The intervention will be tailored for individual families based on the child's appetitive traits. The proposed research will lay the groundwork for a larger trial to support, motivate, and empower low-income parents to prepare healthy meals and use healthy feeding practices, which will improve children's diets and ultimately their health.
Read the detailed description
There is a critical need for primary prevention interventions to help parents shape children's dietary behaviors early in life. These interventions need to be convenient for busy, working families and tailored to children's needs and the family environment. Although there have been several interventions among preschool aged children to improve dietary behaviors, none have used a holistic approach that fully targets the home food environment, by focusing on food quality, food preparation, and positive feeding practices while acknowledging a child's appetitive traits. The proposed research will develop and pilot-test the feasibility, acceptability and preliminary efficacy of a novel home-based intervention to improve the diet quality and family food environment of high-risk preschool age, low-income, ethnically diverse children. This research will build upon previous research including a pre-pilot intervention with 15 mother-child dyads which included two home visits: the first visit included a meal-recording and the second included a motivational interviewing (MI) session using coded video clips from the meal-recording as feedback on the parents' feeding practices. All families were retained and significant improvements in several parental feeding practices were found. Based on lessons learned in the pre-pilot, the proposed 6-month intervention will include home visits by a community health worker (CHW) trained in MI, enhanced by adding several innovative components. The home visits will include in-home cooking demonstrations; tailored text-messages, mailed materials and CHW phone calls. The intervention will be tailored for families based on the child's appetitive traits and eating behaviors. These strategies are expected to increase parental knowledge, self-efficacy, and motivation for serving easy, inexpensive healthy foods in the home, leading to increased child exposure to more healthy and varied foods, improvements in parental feeding practices, and ultimately, improvements in child diet quality. The specific aims are as follows:
Aim 1: To conduct focus groups with 40 ethnically diverse low-income parents of preschoolers (2-5 years) to inform the adaptation and development of the enhanced intervention.
Aim 2: To conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial with 60 parent-child pairs (30 intervention/30 control) from ethnically diverse, low-income families with preschoolers to:
Aim 2.1 Determine the feasibility and acceptability of the enhanced intervention.
Aim 2.2 Determine the preliminary efficacy of the enhanced intervention on changes in children's diet quality (primary outcome) and parental feeding practices and availability of healthy foods in the home (secondary outcomes) and calculate effect sizes for a future randomized controlled trial (RCT).
The investigators hypothesize that the intervention will be feasible and acceptable to parents and that parent-child pairs randomized to the intervention condition will demonstrate greater improvements in the outcomes after six months compared to the comparison condition (attention control of a school readiness intervention).
Exploratory aim: Explore how parents' skills, self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation are related to changes in children's diet quality and parental feeding practices.
- Conditions
- Diet Modification
- Being tested
- Healthy Feeding, Healthy Eating, Reading Readiness
What participants receive
What participants receive. In a randomised study each person is assigned to one group by chance.
Healthy Feeding, Healthy EatingBehavioural
Home Based Motivational Interviewing to Improve Diet Quality of Preschoolers
Reading ReadinessBehavioural
Active Control that uses Motivational Interviewing to improve Reading Readiness of Preschool Children
| Study group | Role | What they receive |
|---|---|---|
| Healthy Feeding, Healthy Eating | Experimental | The experimental arm will receive three home over the first three months of the intervention.Visits will be conducted by a community health worker (CHW) trained in Motivational Interviewing. The home visits will include video-feedback on a meal; in-home cooking demonstrations; tailored text-messages, and mailed materials. During the last three months of the intervention, CHW will conduct monthly phone calls, together with mailed materials and text messages. The intervention will be tailored for families based on the child's appetitive traits and eating behaviors. Receives: Behavioral: Healthy Feeding, Healthy Eating |
| Reading and Readiness | Active comparator | The Reading and Readiness group will receive information on school readiness promotion. Materials will be adapted and delivered by the community health worker (CHW) with a similar dose and schedule as the intervention group (three home visits and three phone calls). During the home visits, the CHW will show a video that models early childhood caregiver-child activities and demonstrates simple methods to interact with their children. They will also send a video of themselves reading with a child, receive text-messages based on these materials as well as the print materials during the last three months of the intervention. Receives: Behavioral: Reading Readiness |
What is being measured
The primary outcome is the main question the study is designed to answer.
HEI-2015 Total and Component Scores
HEI-2015 scores will be calculated from twenty four hour recall data (two of them which are combined and scored per 1000 kcal or as a % of intake per NCI scoring guidelines). HEI was designed to measure diet quality in terms of how well diets conform to the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The total HEI score represents the sum of 12 components scores (minimum component can be 0 and maximum component score shown in parentheses for each), including total fruit (5), whole fruit (5), total vegetables (5), green and beans (includes dark green vegetables and cooked, dried beans and peas because intakes of these types of vegetables are furthest from the amounts recommended in the USDA Food Patterns) (5), whole grain (10), dairy (10), total protein food (5), seafood and plant proteins (5), fatty acids (10), refined grains (10), sodium (10) added sugar (10), saturated fat (10). Higher scores reflect better outcomes.
Measured: Healthy Eating Index Scores at study completion (6 months)
Secondary outcomes (1)
Food Parenting Practices
The intervention effects on 14 subscales of the Food Parenting Inventory were used as secondary outcome measures: Encourage try new foods (P), Encourage exploration of new foods (P), Urge child to eat new foods (P), Repeated Presentation of New foods (P), Family meals (P), Regular timing of meals and snacks (P), Inconsistent mealtimes (N), Indifferent feeding (N), Child involvement in food preparation (P), Pressure to Eat (N), Restriction (N), Food as a reward (N), Responsiveness to child's fullness cues (P), Monitoring (P). We also use one subscale of the Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionnaire: Healthy Eating Guidance (P). All scales are rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (min) to 5 (max). Higher subscale scores indicate greater use of that child feeding practice. We have noted which practice has more positive/desirable practices with a (P) and more negative/not desired sub-scales have an (N) with higher scores.
Measured: Food Parenting Practices at study completion (6 months)
Timeline
From the start of the study to its completion; the mark is today. Estimated dates are the sponsor’s plan.
- First posted22 Apr 2019
- Study start24 Jul 2019
- Primary completion12 Apr 2021
- Study completion12 Apr 2021
Resources
- Official record on ClinicalTrials.govThe registry entry this page is built from, with its full change history.
- Posted resultsParticipant flow, outcome measures and adverse events reported by the sponsor.
- Publications (2)Papers the sponsor has linked to this study.
- Other trials for Diet ModificationStudies of the same condition, open and under way.
- What the trial phases meanHow a treatment moves from first tests in people to approval.
More details
For doctors and researchers: how the study is designed, who runs it, and its registry IDs.
Study design
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Phase N/A
- Primary purpose
- Prevention
- Allocation
- Randomised
- Intervention model
- Parallel groups
- Model description
- Intervention vs. Attention Control
- Masking
- Double blind
- Who is masked
- Investigator, Outcomes assessor
- Enrolment
- 63 participants (actual)
Sponsor and investigators
- Lead sponsor
- University of Rhode Island
- Sponsor type
- University, hospital or other
- Collaborators
- Brown University, University of Connecticut
- Responsible party
- Principal investigator, Alison Tovar, University of Rhode Island
IDs, dates and publications
- ClinicalTrials.gov ID
- NCT03923491
- Sponsor's protocol ID
- 1R34HL140229-01A1
- Status last verified
- Dec 2023
- First submitted
- 14 Aug 2018
- Last updated
- 18 Dec 2023
- Results posted
- Yes, on ClinicalTrials.gov
- Data monitoring committee
- No
- FDA-regulated drug
- No
- FDA-regulated device
- No
- Individual data sharing
- Undecided
Publications
Fox K, Gans K, McCurdy K, Risica PM, Jennings E, Gorin A, Papandonatos GD, Tovar A. Rationale, design and study protocol of the 'Strong Families Start at Home' feasibility trial to improve the diet quality of low-income, ethnically diverse children by helping parents improve their feeding and food preparation practices. Contemp Clin Trials Commun. 2020 Jun 16;19:100583. doi: 10.1016/j.conctc.2020.100583. eCollection 2020 Sep.
PubMed 32637721McCurdy K, Gans KM, Risica PM, Fox K, Tovar A. Food insecurity, food parenting practices, and child eating behaviors among low-income Hispanic families of young children. Appetite. 2022 Feb 1;169:105857. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2021.105857. Epub 2021 Dec 10.
PubMed 34896386
Study at a glance
From the registry record, last updated by the sponsor on 18 Dec 2023. Recruitment status is as the sponsor reported it: confirm with the study team.
- Official title
- A Home-based Video and Motivational Interviewing Intervention to Improve Preschoolers Diet Quality and Parental Food Parenting Practices
- ClinicalTrials.gov ID
- NCT03923491
- Acronym / sponsor ID
- 1R34HL140229-01A1
- Conditions
- Diet Modification
- Study type
- Interventional
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Enrolment
- 63 participants (actual)
- Lead sponsor
- University of Rhode IslandUniversity, hospital or other
- Collaborators
- Brown University, University of Connecticut
- Study start
- 24 Jul 2019 (actual)
- Primary completion
- 12 Apr 2021 (actual)
- Study completion
- 12 Apr 2021 (actual)
- First posted
- 22 Apr 2019 (actual)
- Results
- Posted 18 Dec 2023
Clinical summary
The research question as the sponsor registered it. This describes what the study plans to test, not what it found.
U.S. children eat too little fruits and vegetables and whole grains, and too many energy dense foods, dietary behaviors associated with increased morbidity from cardiovascular diseases. Parents play a key role in shaping their child's diet and best practices suggest that parents should involve children in food preparation, offer, model and encourage a variety of healthy foods. In addition, while parents help to shape food preferences, not all children respond in the same way and certain appetitive traits, such as satiety responsiveness (sensitivity to internal satiety signals), food responsiveness (sensitivity to external food cues), and enjoyment of food may help explain some of these differences. Prior interventions among preschool aged children to improve their diet have not used a holistic approach that fully targets the home food environment, by focusing on food quality, food preparation, and positive feeding practices while acknowledging a child's appetitive traits. This proposal will build upon pre-pilot work to develop and pilot-test the feasibility, acceptability and preliminary efficacy of a novel home-based intervention. The proposed 6-month intervention, will include 3 monthly home visits by a community health worker (CHW) trained in motivational interviewing, that include in-home cooking demos. In between visits, parents will receive tailored text-messages 2x/wk. and monthly mailed tailored materials. During the last 3 months CHW phone calls will replace the home visits. The intervention will be tailored for individual families based on the child's appetitive traits. The proposed research will lay the groundwork for a larger trial to support, motivate, and empower low-income parents to prepare healthy meals and use healthy feeding practices, which will improve children's diets and ultimately their health.
Detailed description
There is a critical need for primary prevention interventions to help parents shape children's dietary behaviors early in life. These interventions need to be convenient for busy, working families and tailored to children's needs and the family environment. Although there have been several interventions among preschool aged children to improve dietary behaviors, none have used a holistic approach that fully targets the home food environment, by focusing on food quality, food preparation, and positive feeding practices while acknowledging a child's appetitive traits. The proposed research will develop and pilot-test the feasibility, acceptability and preliminary efficacy of a novel home-based intervention to improve the diet quality and family food environment of high-risk preschool age, low-income, ethnically diverse children. This research will build upon previous research including a pre-pilot intervention with 15 mother-child dyads which included two home visits: the first visit included a meal-recording and the second included a motivational interviewing (MI) session using coded video clips from the meal-recording as feedback on the parents' feeding practices. All families were retained and significant improvements in several parental feeding practices were found. Based on lessons learned in the pre-pilot, the proposed 6-month intervention will include home visits by a community health worker (CHW) trained in MI, enhanced by adding several innovative components. The home visits will include in-home cooking demonstrations; tailored text-messages, mailed materials and CHW phone calls. The intervention will be tailored for families based on the child's appetitive traits and eating behaviors. These strategies are expected to increase parental knowledge, self-efficacy, and motivation for serving easy, inexpensive healthy foods in the home, leading to increased child exposure to more healthy and varied foods, improvements in parental feeding practices, and ultimately, improvements in child diet quality. The specific aims are as follows:
Aim 1: To conduct focus groups with 40 ethnically diverse low-income parents of preschoolers (2-5 years) to inform the adaptation and development of the enhanced intervention.
Aim 2: To conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial with 60 parent-child pairs (30 intervention/30 control) from ethnically diverse, low-income families with preschoolers to:
Aim 2.1 Determine the feasibility and acceptability of the enhanced intervention.
Aim 2.2 Determine the preliminary efficacy of the enhanced intervention on changes in children's diet quality (primary outcome) and parental feeding practices and availability of healthy foods in the home (secondary outcomes) and calculate effect sizes for a future randomized controlled trial (RCT).
The investigators hypothesize that the intervention will be feasible and acceptable to parents and that parent-child pairs randomized to the intervention condition will demonstrate greater improvements in the outcomes after six months compared to the comparison condition (attention control of a school readiness intervention).
Exploratory aim: Explore how parents' skills, self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation are related to changes in children's diet quality and parental feeding practices.
Study design
- Primary purpose
- Prevention
- Allocation
- Randomised
- Intervention model
- Parallel groups
- Masking
- Double blind (investigator, outcomes assessor)
- Number of arms
- 2
- Model description
- Intervention vs. Attention Control
| Arm | Type | Receives |
|---|---|---|
| Healthy Feeding, Healthy Eating | Experimental | Behavioral: Healthy Feeding, Healthy EatingThe experimental arm will receive three home over the first three months of the intervention.Visits will be conducted by a community health worker (CHW) trained in Motivational Interviewing. The home visits will include video-feedback on a meal; in-home cooking demonstrations; tailored text-messages, and mailed materials. During the last three months of the intervention, CHW will conduct monthly phone calls, together with mailed materials and text messages. The intervention will be tailored for families based on the child's appetitive traits and eating behaviors. |
| Reading and Readiness | Active comparator | Behavioral: Reading ReadinessThe Reading and Readiness group will receive information on school readiness promotion. Materials will be adapted and delivered by the community health worker (CHW) with a similar dose and schedule as the intervention group (three home visits and three phone calls). During the home visits, the CHW will show a video that models early childhood caregiver-child activities and demonstrates simple methods to interact with their children. They will also send a video of themselves reading with a child, receive text-messages based on these materials as well as the print materials during the last three months of the intervention. |
Who may qualify
- Ages
- 18 to 95 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Accepted
- Age groups
- Adult, Older adult
Key inclusion criteria (5 listed)
- Speak English or Spanish
- Have a child between 2- 5 years of age
- Live with their child most of the time
- Have a phone that is able to video-record
- Be willing to have evening meals video recorded in the home
Key exclusion criteria (1 listed)
- Has a diagnosed feeding disorder, dietary restrictions, or medical condition that impacts how they feed their child.
Eligibility is decided by the study team after screening; this overview does not establish that a patient qualifies. Full inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Interventions
| Intervention | Type | Arms |
|---|---|---|
| Healthy Feeding, Healthy EatingHome Based Motivational Interviewing to Improve Diet Quality of Preschoolers | Behavioural | Healthy Feeding, Healthy Eating |
| Reading ReadinessActive Control that uses Motivational Interviewing to improve Reading Readiness of Preschool Children | Behavioural | Reading and Readiness |
Primary outcome
HEI-2015 Total and Component Scores
Time frame: Healthy Eating Index Scores at study completion (6 months)
HEI-2015 scores will be calculated from twenty four hour recall data (two of them which are combined and scored per 1000 kcal or as a % of intake per NCI scoring guidelines). HEI was designed to measure diet quality in terms of how well diets conform to the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The total HEI score represents the sum of 12 components scores (minimum component can be 0 and maximum component score shown in parentheses for each), including total fruit (5), whole fruit (5), total vegetables (5), green and beans (includes dark green vegetables and cooked, dried beans and peas because intakes of these types of vegetables are furthest from the amounts recommended in the USDA Food Patterns) (5), whole grain (10), dairy (10), total protein food (5), seafood and plant proteins (5), fatty acids (10), refined grains (10), sodium (10) added sugar (10), saturated fat (10). Higher scores reflect better outcomes.
1 secondary outcome
Food Parenting Practices
Time frame: Food Parenting Practices at study completion (6 months)
Results and safety
Loading the posted results from ClinicalTrials.gov…
Research links
- Official record on ClinicalTrials.govLast updated by the sponsor 18 Dec 2023.
- Posted resultsParticipant flow, baseline, all outcome measures and adverse events.
- Background: PubMed 32637721Fox K, Gans K, McCurdy K, Risica PM, Jennings E, Gorin A, Papandonatos GD, Tovar A. Rationale, design and study protocol of the 'Strong Families Start at Home' feasibility trial to improve the diet quality of low-income, ethnically diverse children by helping parents improve their feeding and food preparation practices. Contemp Clin Trials Commun. 2020 Jun 16;19:100583. doi: 10.1016/j.conctc.2020.100583. eCollection 2020 Sep.
- Background: PubMed 34896386McCurdy K, Gans KM, Risica PM, Fox K, Tovar A. Food insecurity, food parenting practices, and child eating behaviors among low-income Hispanic families of young children. Appetite. 2022 Feb 1;169:105857. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2021.105857. Epub 2021 Dec 10.
- Individual participant dataSharing planned: Undecided
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Referral and contact
AzTrials does not enrol participants or take referrals. Contact the study team or a site listed below; they decide who can take part. This study is not recruiting at the moment.
The record lists no contact. Use the official record to reach the sponsor.
1 site in 1 country: see every site and its status.
Questions about this trial
What is this clinical trial studying?
A study testing Healthy Feeding, Healthy Eating and Reading Readiness in people with Diet Modification, run by University of Rhode Island at 1 site in United States.
The full registered description is in the About this study section and the official record.
Who may be eligible to take part?
The sponsor lists 5 inclusion and 1 exclusion criteria. Eligibility is decided by the study team after screening, so read the full criteria and contact a listed site.
Is this clinical trial currently recruiting?
The record says: finished, as of the sponsor's last update on 18 Dec 2023. Status can change between updates, so confirm with the study contact before making plans.
Where is the study taking place?
The record lists 1 site in United States. Whether a site is taking part right now should be confirmed with that site. See every site.
What are the possible benefits and risks?
They depend on the study and the treatment, and no study can promise a benefit. The study team explains the known risks during informed consent, before anyone joins; the record itself does not list them.
Are results available for this study?
Yes. Results are posted in the registry (first posted 18 Dec 2023). A summary is in the For doctors view, and the full results are on ClinicalTrials.gov.
How can a doctor refer a patient or contact the research team?
The record lists no contact. The official record names the sponsor, who can be asked directly. AzTrials does not enrol participants or take referrals.
What does the primary outcome measure?
HEI-2015 Total and Component Scores (time frame: Healthy Eating Index Scores at study completion (6 months)). It is what the study was designed to measure, not a finding.
Where can I read the original study information?
On the ClinicalTrials.gov record for NCT03923491, which also lists 2 linked publications.
Does a listing mean the treatment is approved or proven to work?
No. A listing means the study is registered. It does not show that the treatment is safe, works, or is approved by a regulator.
How often is this information updated?
AzTrials copies changed records from ClinicalTrials.gov every night and reloads the whole registry every week. The sponsor last updated this record on 18 Dec 2023.