Health promotion from an early age is key to preventing unhealthy weight development in childhood, and parental involvement is essential. The school-based Healthy School Start intervention aims to promote healthy dietary and activity habits in the home environment and prevent child obesity through parental support. This study evaluated the effectiveness of the third iteration of the programme on children's dietary and activity behaviours, and body composition through a cluster-randomised controlled trial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Parents' behaviours towards food and mealtimes, also known as parental feeding practices, are important in the development of children's eating habits. The Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionnaire (CFPQ) was designed to measure parental feeding practices. The aim of this study was to evaluate the validity of the CFPQ in Sweden and to assess how it performs across different groups of people.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: Current dietary habits have substantial negative impacts on the health of people and the planet. This study aimed to develop a novel approach for achieving health-promoting and climate-friendly dietary recommendations for a broad range of consumers.
Subjects And Methods: Hierarchical clustering analysis was combined with linear programming to design nutritionally adequate, health-promoting, climate-friendly and culturally acceptable diets using Swedish national dietary data (n = 1797).
Background: The rise in overweight and obesity among children is a global problem and effective prevention interventions are urgently required. Parents play an important role in children's lifestyle behaviours and body weight development and therefore there is a great need to investigate how to involve parents effectively in health promotion and prevention programmes. The aim of the study was to describe parents' experiences of barriers and facilitators of participating in the Healthy School Start Plus (HSSP) intervention study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: This study will explore implementation mechanisms through which a single implementation strategy and a multifaceted implementation strategy operate to affect the implementation outcome, which is fidelity to the Guideline For The Prevention of Mental Ill Health within schools. The guideline gives recommendations on how workplaces can prevent mental ill health among their personnel by managing social and organizational risks factors in the work environment. Schools are chosen as the setting for the study due to the high prevalence of mental ill health among teachers and other personnel working in schools.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Sweden updated its legislation on universal free school meals in 2011 and nutrition was explicitly mentioned. The current study (i) describes cross-sectional changes in school lunch nutritional quality during the following eight years and (ii) examines if repeated self-auditing, using a fully automated, online tool (School Food Sweden), based on the implementation strategy of audit and feedback, was associated with improvements.
Design: Both repeated cross-sectional and longitudinal design.
Background: There is limited research on prevention of mental ill-health of school personnel and the systematic management of school work environments. The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of implementing the guideline recommendations for the prevention of mental ill-health in schools, in particular, whether there was a difference in adherence to guideline recommendations between a multifaceted (group 1) and single implementation strategy (group 2) from baseline to 6 and to 12 months.
Method: We conducted a cluster-randomized controlled trial with a 6- and 12-month follow-up.
The objective was to examine the associations between physical activity parenting practices (PAPP) and children's levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), and time spent sedentary (SED) during non-school time in weekdays and weekends when children's activity style was taken into account. Study participants were 88 children (mean age 6.3 (SD 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: IMPROVE aims to conduct a hybrid type 3 evaluation design to test the effectiveness of bundled implementation strategies on intervention fidelity of the Healthy School Start (HSS) program, while simultaneously monitoring effects on health outcomes of children and parents. The HSS is a 4-component family support program for children starting school (5-7 years of age) promoting healthy dietary habits and physical activity in the home environment to prevent childhood obesity and parents' risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Methods: IMPROVE is a cluster-randomized controlled trial with two arms to evaluate and compare the effects of two different bundles of implementation strategies on intervention fidelity expressed as adherence and responsiveness at 12 and 24 months (primary outcomes).
Low-carbon diets can counteract climate change and promote health if they are nutritionally adequate, affordable and culturally acceptable. This study aimed at developing sustainable diets and to compare these with the EAT-Lancet diet. The Swedish national dietary survey Riksmaten Adolescents 2016-2017 was used as the baseline.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is an urgent need to align human diets with goals for environmental sustainability and population health. The OPTIMAT™-intervention study was developed to implement and evaluate a nutritionally adequate and climate-friendly 4-week lunch menu in Swedish primary schools. This study aimed to explore pupils' and kitchen staff's experiences of the intervention and to identify barriers and facilitators to successful implementation of sustainable school meals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Children's voices are seldom heard in process evaluations concerning health promotion programmes. A Healthy School Start Plus (HSSP) is a parental support programme, conducted in Sweden, with the aim of promoting healthy diet, physical activity and preventing obesity in preschool class children. The 6-month programme includes: (1) Health information to parents; (2) Motivational Interviewing with parents by school nurses; (3) Classroom activities and home assignments for children; (4) A self-test of type-2 diabetes risk for parents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Fruit and vegetable consumption in the United Kingdom is currently well below recommended levels, with a significant associated public health burden. The United Kingdom has committed to reducing its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, and this transition will require shifts towards plant-based diets.
Objective: The aim was to quantify the health effects, environmental footprints, and cost associated with 4 different pathways to meeting the United Kingdom's "5-a-day" recommendation for fruit and vegetable consumption.
Background: School meals hold considerable potential to shape children's diets and reduce food-related greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE)-in the short and long term. This study applied linear optimization to develop a GHGE-reduced, nutritionally adequate, and affordable school lunch menu. The effects on food waste, consumption and pupils' satisfaction with the meals were evaluated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Low levels of physical activity, sedentary behaviour and mental health problems are issues that have received considerable attention in the last decade. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to investigate effects of interventions targeting school-related physical activity or sedentary behaviour on mental health in children and adolescents and to identify the features of effective interventions.
Methods: Scientific articles published between January 2009 and October 2019 fulfilling the following criteria were included: general populations of children and adolescents between age 4 and 19, all types of school-related efforts to promote physical activity or reduce sedentary behaviour.
Objective: School lunches have potential to foster healthy diets in all children, but data on their importance are relatively scarce. The current study aimed to describe the dietary intake from school lunches by sex and school grade, and to assess how the daily intake, school lunch intake and the daily intake provided by lunch differ by sex and parental education.
Design: Cross-sectional.
A low intake of fruit and vegetables is a significant contributor to the global burden of disease. The aim of this study was to estimate the size of the risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D) of a low intake and to investigate possible sex differences. In this regard, this study used a longitudinal data from the Stockholm Public Health Cohort located in Sweden, collected in 2010 and 2014.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth-related behaviours in children can be influenced by parental support programmes. The aim of this study was to explore barriers to and facilitators for the implementation of a parental support programme to promote physical activity and healthy dietary habits in a school context. We explored the views and experiences of 17 coordinating school nurses, non-coordinating school nurses, and school principals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Given today's high prevalence of common mental disorders and related sick leave among teachers, an urgent need exists for a more systematic approach to the management of social and organizational risk factors within schools. In 2015, we launched the first Swedish occupational health guideline to support a structured prevention of these risks at the workplace. The existence of guidelines does however not guarantee their usage, as studies show that guidelines are often underused.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Effects of obesity prevention interventions in early childhood are only meaningful if they are sustained over time, but long-term follow-up studies are rare. The school-based cluster-randomised Healthy School Start (HSS) trial aimed at child health promotion and obesity prevention through parental support was carried out in 31 pre-school classes (378 families) in disadvantaged areas in Sweden during 2012-2013. Post-intervention results showed intervention effects on intake of unhealthy foods and drinks, and lower BMI-sds in children with obesity at baseline.
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