The prevalence of overweight among preschool-aged children in the United States is increasing at an alarming rate. The preschool years provide an opportunity to establish healthful eating and physical activity behaviors which can lessen the growth of obesity. Food Friends - Making New Foods Fun for Kids(R) is a social marketing campaign designed to promote healthful habits among preschool-aged children and has been conducted in Colorado since 2000.1-9 This program has been successfully evaluated to ensure that changes in eating behavior are attained. Food Friends(R) promotes the importance of trying new foods to increase dietary variety consumed among these children while also targeting secondary influencers - teachers and parents of preschoolers. To further enhance the Food Friends(R) program's efforts and to enhance its commercialization potential, additional educational materials and products are warranted. After 10 years of research with the target audience, storybooks are one such product which continues to emerge from dialog with teachers, parents and children as a desired product. Bilingual storybooks which utilize the Food Friends(R) characters may play a role in bridging the home and classroom eating environments by promoting, repeating, and thus amplifying program messages for both children and parents. The addition of bilingual storybooks will not only enhance existing program activities, but they will also serve as a foundation for building a new Food Friends(R) program component for children and parents who are not attending a preschool center. By building on the success of the Food Friends(R) program, this proposal will examine how key elements of the classroom component can be utilized and packaged to into a new home-based program in an effort to duplicate the behavioral changes of increased offering (parents) and increased willingness to try (children) new foods that have been seen with Food Friends(R). The creation of Food Friends(R) storybooks will strengthen Food Friends, Inc.'s position in the marketplace by potentially driving the price of the classroom kit down. Further, Food Friends(R) storybooks will enhance an underutilized market (center-based parents) and create a new market with programming for at-home parents. The creation of bilingual storybooks, which promote positive messages about healthful eating, will fill a large void in the market. In addition to having commercial potential, the Food Friends(R) storybooks have great potential to amplify messages and behaviors which have been demonstrated by the Food Friends(R) classroom component to improve preschoolers'dietary habits.
Food Friends- Making New Foods Fun for Kids(R) is a successfully evaluated social marketing campaign which demonstrates an increase in children's willingness to try new foods. Increasing willingness to try new foods and hence, improving food choice and dietary quality, during a period in childhood when eating habits are formed can play a role in containing the growing epidemic of overweight and decrease the risk for chronic disease later in life.
| Bellows, Laura; Spaeth, Amanda; Lee, Victoria et al. (2013) Exploring the use of storybooks to reach mothers of preschoolers with nutrition and physical activity messages. J Nutr Educ Behav 45:362-7 |
