Get healthy together: a program to improve counseling for childhood obesity in community-based WIC clinics.

Counseling parents of overweight children is a sensitive issue that has been reported to be difficult for many health professionals. The Get Healthy Together (GHT) project involved an 18-month intervention that provided skills training and new tools to Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program staff and a staff wellness program to improve the physical self-concept and functioning of WIC employees. All WIC staff from the 48 WIC clinics in New Mexico participated in this study.

Innovative tools help counselors discuss childhood obesity with parents.

Background: Childhood overweight and obesity pose potential health risks for many children under the age of 5 years. Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutritionists are in a unique position to help reduce this problem because of their frequent counseling contacts with clients during certification visits. Therefore, four new tools to facilitate nutritional counseling of parents of overweight children during certifications were developed and systematically evaluated.

Motivational interviewing skills are positively associated with nutritionist self-efficacy.

Objective: To examine the relationships between physical and social self-concepts, motivational interviewing (MI), and nutrition assessment skills with dimensions of counseling self-efficacy.

Design: Cross-sectional survey.

Setting: Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) clinics.

Evaluation of the BOD POD for estimating percent body fat in collegiate track and field female athletes: a comparison of four methods.

This investigation examined the accuracy of the BOD POD on a group of Division I collegiate track and field female athletes (N = 30). Hydrostatic weighing (HW) was used as the gold standard method. Body density (Db) values obtained from the BOD POD (Db BP) were compared with those determined by HW (Db HW).

Dietary intake and parents' perception of mealtime behaviors in preschool-age children with autism spectrum disorder and in typically developing children.

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently report that their children have selective eating behaviors and refuse many foods, which could result in inadequate nutrient intake. This preliminary cross-sectional descriptive study investigated dietary intake and parents' reported perception of food behaviors of 20 3- to 5-year-old children with ASD. Twenty typically developing children matched for sex, age, and ethnicity were also studied as a case-control comparison.