Publications by authors named "Baranowski T"

Serious video games for health are designed to entertain players while attempting to modify some aspect of their health behavior. Behavior is a complex process influenced by multiple factors, often making it difficult to change. Behavioral science provides insight into factors that influence specific actions that can be used to guide key game design decisions.

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Unlabelled: Fruit and vegetable (FV) intake has been proposed to protect against obesity. The purpose of this paper was to assess the FV consumption to adiposity relationship. Twenty-three publications were included.

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Fruit and vegetable intake may reduce the risk of some chronic diseases. However, many children consume less-than-recommended amounts of fruit and vegetables. Because health professionals and dietetics practitioners often work with parents to increase children's fruit and vegetable intake, assessing their opinions about the effectiveness of parenting practices is an important step in understanding how to promote fruit and vegetable intake among preschool-aged children.

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Background: We examined the effects of a multicomponent, school-based program addressing risk factors for diabetes among children whose race or ethnic group and socioeconomic status placed them at high risk for obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Methods: Using a cluster design, we randomly assigned 42 schools to either a multicomponent school-based intervention (21 schools) or assessment only (control, 21 schools). A total of 4603 students participated (mean [+/- SD] age, 11.

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Video games are a popular form of entertainment. Serious video games for health attempt to use entertainment to promote health behavior change. When designed within a framework informed by behavioral science and supported by commercial game-design principles, serious video games for health have the potential to be an effective method for promoting self-management behaviors among youth with diabetes.

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Background: Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs are designed to make walking and bicycling to school safe and accessible for children. Despite their growing popularity, few validated measures exist for assessing important outcomes such as type of student transport or pedestrian safety behaviors. This research validated the SRTS school travel survey and a pedestrian safety behavior checklist.

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Objective: Interventions that aim to improve child dietary quality and reduce disease risk often involve parents. The most effective methods to engage parents remain unclear. A systematic review of interventions designed to change child and adolescent dietary behavior was conducted to answer whether parent involvement enhanced intervention effectiveness, and what type of involvement was most effective in achieving desired outcomes.

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Objective: To improve an existing measure of fruit and vegetable intake self efficacy by including items that varied on levels of difficulty, and testing a corresponding measure of water intake self efficacy.

Design: Cross sectional assessment. Items were modified to have easy, moderate and difficult levels of self efficacy.

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This research tested whether children could categorize foods more accurately and speedily when presented with child-generated rather than professionally generated food categories, and whether a graphically appealing browse procedure similar to the Apple iTunes (Cupertino, CA) "cover flow" graphical user interface accomplished this better than the more common tree-view structure. In Fall 2008, 104 multiethnic children ages 8 to 13 were recruited at the Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX) and randomly assigned to two browse procedures: cover flow (collages of foods in a category) or tree view (food categories in a list). Within each browse condition children categorized the same randomly ordered 26 diverse foods to both child and professionally organized categories (with method randomly sequenced per child).

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Objective: To assess the accuracy of portion-size estimates and participant preferences using various presentations of digital images.

Design: Two observational feeding studies were conducted. In both, each participant selected and consumed foods for breakfast and lunch, buffet style, serving themselves portions of nine foods representing five forms (eg, amorphous, pieces).

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Serious video games (VG) offer new opportunities for promoting health related diet and physical activity change among children. Games can be designed to use storylines, characters, and behavior change procedures, including modeling (e.g.

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Objective: To examine the relationship of 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) sensitivity to BMI while statistically controlling for demographic characteristics in two age groups of children: 9-10 years and 17-18 years (n 1551).

Design: Cross-sectional design with a multi-ethnic (White, African-American, Hispanic, Other) sample of 813 children aged 9-10 years and 738 children aged 17-18 years. Children were recruited from local elementary and high schools with at least 30 % minority ethnic enrolment.

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Objectives: The effects of a Boy Scout Five-A-Day Badge program on fruit juice (FJ) and low-fat vegetable (LV) consumption were evaluated using a two-condition (treatment, active-attention-placebo-control) group randomized trial, with three data collection periods (baseline, immediate post, 6-month post).

Methods: Forty-two Boy Scout troops (n=473, 10- to 14-year-old Scouts) in Houston, TX, were randomly assigned to condition. The 9-week program included approximately 30 min of weekly troop time, plus approximately 25 min of weekly Internet programming.

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Objective: To review and critique current experimentally-based evidence of theoretical mechanisms of dietary behavior change in youth and provide recommendations on ways to enhance theory evaluation.

Methods: Interventions that examined mediators of dietary behavior change in youth (age 5-18 years) were identified via electronic database searches and reference scanning. Selected studies were reviewed for quality and content and findings were tabulated.

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The HEALTHY primary prevention trial was designed and implemented in response to the growing numbers of children and adolescents being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The objective was to moderate risk factors for type 2 diabetes. Modifiable risk factors measured were indicators of adiposity and glycemic dysregulation: body mass index > or =85th percentile, fasting glucose > or =5.

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Background: Parents are often involved in interventions to engage youth in physical activity, but it is not clear which methods for involving parents are effective.

Purpose: A systematic review was conducted of interventions with physical activity and parental components among healthy youth to identify how best to involve parents in physical activity interventions for children.

Evidence Acquisition: Identified intervention studies were reviewed in 2008 for study design, description of family components, and physical activity outcomes.

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Objective: Parents may influence children's fruit and vegetable (F&V) consumption in many ways, but research has focused primarily on counterproductive parenting practices, such as restriction and pressure to eat. The present study aimed to assess the association of diverse parenting practices to promote F&V and its consumption among pre-school children.

Design: An exploratory analysis was performed on cross-sectional data from 755 Head Start pre-school children and their parents collected in 2004-5.

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Background: Theoretically, increased levels of physical activity self-efficacy (PASE) should lead to increased physical activity, but few studies have reported this effect among youth. This failure may be at least partially attributable to measurement limitations. In this study, Item Response Modeling (IRM) was used to develop new physical activity and sedentary behavior change self-efficacy scales.

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Objective: HEALTHY is a 3-year middle school intervention program designed to reduce risk factors for type 2 diabetes. The prevalence of diabetes risk factors at baseline in a cohort of 6,358 sixth-grade students is reported.

Research Design And Methods: Forty-two schools at seven U.

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Obesity prevention interventions through dietary and physical activity change have generally not been effective. Limitations on possible program effectiveness are herein identified at every step in the mediating variable model, a generic conceptual framework for understanding how interventions may promote behavior change. To minimize these problems, and thereby enhance likely intervention effectiveness, four sequential types of formative studies are proposed: targeted behavior validation, targeted mediator validation, intervention procedure validation, and pilot feasibility intervention.

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Optical clarity of larvae makes the zebrafish ideal for real-time analyses of vertebrate organ function through the use of fluorescent reporters of enzymatic activities. A key function of digestive organs is to couple the generation of enzymes with mechanical processes that enable nutrient availability and absorption. However, it has been extremely difficult, and in many cases not possible, to directly observe digestive processes in a live vertebrate.

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This study assessed how 8- to 13-year-old children categorized and labeled grain foods and how these categories and labels were influenced by child characteristics. The main hypotheses were that children categorized foods in consistent ways and these food categories differed from the professional food categories. A set of 71 cards with pictures and names of grain foods from eight professionally defined food groups was sorted by each child into piles of similar foods.

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