) Certain cancers are more common among African-Americans than Euro- Americans. Dietary factors, especially fruit and vegetable (F&V) consumption, have been related to each of these cancers; and dietary patterns are learned among youth. Since youth consumption of F&V is less than half of the minimum goal of five servings per day, interventions are warranted among African-American youth to increase their F&V consumption and thereby reduce cancer risk when the learned habits and preferences are taken into the adult years. While much nutrition education for youth has been conducted in schools, these programs, when they worked, have achieved modest levels of dietary change. Other channels are necessary to provide more and complementary messages. Recent work by one of the co-investigators revealed that a 5- A-Day Achievement Badge program helped Girl Scouts achieve an increase in F&V consumption. Boy Scout programs are also an attractive channel since they include an emphasis on diet as a component of developing and maintaining fitness and the self-sufficiency needed in food preparation for camping. Boy Scout programs have been developed for urban minority children, called Urban Boy Scouts (UBS), to bring the pleasures and skills of scouting to urban youth. No 5-A-Day program has been developed for Boy Scouts, especially African-American UBS who have higher cancer risks. To test the efficacy of a 5-A-Day program for UBS, a pilot study will be implemented, employing a two group experimental and wait list control design. In the first year, extensive formative evaluation will be done to adapt the applicant's Gimme 5 curriculum to the needs and cultural sensitivities of African- American UBS in Houston and adapt the Gimme 5 measures. The intervention to be developed will include 12 weekly 30-minute activity sessions and two camping booster sessions implemented by a troop dietary assistant, 12 weekly comic strips to complement the weekly activities, and 12 newsletters sent home with parent-child home badge activities. The evaluation will assess outcomes (scout: F&V consumption; parent: availability and accessibility of F&V) and psychosocial mediating processes (scout: F&V preferences, self-efficacy, normative expectations; parent: motivation and self-efficacy to increase child's F&V consumption; troop leader: motivation and self-efficacy to increase scouts F&V consumption). Analyses will take into account the clustered nature of the data. If successful, the results of this project can be distributed nationwide to more than one million Boy Scouts. While hormones have been linked to prostate cancer, little is known about hormones in youth or their relationship to dietary practices. This project will test the relationship of F&V consumption to cancer-related hormones among African-American boys.
