I have been working on the Child Health
Exercise and Wellness (CHEW) Intervention Program that the Nutrition Department
at Mason has been running since January 2016.
I was able to see the study go from the early stages when it was still
going through IRB approval, to personally having to call potential participants
to recruit and screen them for the study, to now in December where we are
wrapping up the study by conducting the final 6 month assessment visits.
What got me interested in this study is that it
was created to help Latino children and their families in Fairfax combat
childhood obesity. Being Latina and majoring in community health, I know that
Latinos are at higher risk of becoming overweight/obese. When I heard that my
nutrition professor, Dr. Sina Gallo, needed someone who could speak Spanish and
was interested in helping the Latino community, I jumped at the opportunity. It
is great being able to give back to my
community and help provide them with resources that they might not have been
able to get have they not enrolled in the intervention.
Being a part of this research study is also
beneficial to my career goals. I hope to go into nursing and still be able to
educate my community on how to live a healthier life and how to prevent
diseases; working on this research study has given me hands on experience on
trying to effectively educate a population group. As well as how to create a
wellness program that will help treat and/or prevent a certain health
condition.
Prior to the start of the intervention, I was
recruiting participants and screening them over the phone, as well as
translating documents that had to get IRB approval. Once the intervention began
and we started collecting data I became in charge of translating the data since
it was all in Spanish, inputting the data onto Nutritionist Pro in order to do
a nutrition analysis on what the participants were consuming, as well inputting
other data we collected throughout the six months of the intervention program.
The intervention lasted six months, in which participants met one-on-one with a
nutrition educator once month. Now that the intervention is over, we have been
conducting the final assessment visit in which participants get a DXA scan, go
on the metabolic cart to obtain their resting expenditure, and collect other
data in order to compare it to the data collected in the baseline visit; this
helps us determine whether there is a significant difference between the
control and intervention groups and whether the intervention was effective.
Once the final visits are complete we will be doing data analysis. It has been
very rewarding seeing the study from start to finish, as well as seeing the
impact the program has had on the families.
