Community-wide youth nutrition education: long-term outcomes of the Minnesota Heart Health Program

Abstract

The Class of 1989 was part of the Minnesota Heart Health Program, a research and demonstration project designed to reduce cardiovascular disease in three intervention communities. This paper describes the long-term outcomes of a school- and community-based intervention on healthy eating behaviors in one intervention and matched reference community. Beginning in the sixth grade (1983), seven annual waves of behavioral measurements were taken from both communities (baseline N = 2376). Self-reported data were collected at each time period including measures of knowledge and preferences for certain foods, and food salting behavior. Data were analyzed using an ANCOVA model adjusting for baseline dependent variable differences, with the school as the unit of analysis. Knowledge, healthy food choices and restraint in food salting behavior variables were significantly higher throughout most of the follow-up period in the intervention community for females. Males also indicated greater knowledge of healthier choices in the intervention community and greater restraint in salting behavior but results are less conclusive for healthy food choices. These results suggest that multiple intervention components such as behavioral education in schools coupled with community-wide health promotion strategies can produce modest but lasting improvement in adolescent knowledge and choices of heart healthy foods and less frequent food salting practices, and that this improvement is most notable among females.