“Just Say It Like It Is!” Use of a Community-Based Participatory Approach to Develop a Technology-Driven Food Literacy Program for Adolescents

Abstract

FuelUp&Go! is a technology-driven food literacy program consisting of six in-person skill building sessions as well as fitness trackers, text messages, and a companion website. A community-based participatory research approach was used with adolescents who were recruited to participate in a Kid Council. Qualitative data were collected about the use of surveys, program activities, recipes, technology and text messages, and music and incentives. Changes suggested by Kid Councilmembers informed the design and development of a pilot program. Participants were recruited for the pilot program and completed pre- and postintervention surveys. The results indicated food-related knowledge remained low but increased from baseline to follow-up. Attitudes toward vegetables and physical activity increased slightly. Self-reported participation in physical activity and consumption of sugar-added beverages moved in positive directions. These findings suggest that community-based participatory research approach is an effective approach to engage adolescents in the development of a technology-driven food literacy program.

Towards the Implementation of a Conceptual Framework of Food and Nutrition Literacy: Providing Healthy Eating for the Population

“…Nevertheless, the FL dimension does not incorporate NL, which could be considered as an independent concept as well. In fact, only the authors of five papers discussed both NL and FL in their papers [3,40,53,80,81]. On the contrary, several authors exclusively referred to NL and described the meaning of the concept in detail [5,13,14,16,22,[27][28][29][30][31][32]35].…”

“…Some other definitions of FL focused on individuals' relationship with food [21,[37][38][39][40]. Five previous papers agreed that FL represents a set of skills, knowledge, awareness, and behaviors that allows individuals to adequately interact with food, from being able to prepare it in order to meet nutrition guidelines, up to navigating the complex food system.…”

“…Analogously, twelve papers that discussed FL agreed that this dimension implied improved food and nutrition knowledge, and skills such as cooking [16,21,23,37,56,61,62,65,[70][71][72][73]. The authors of twenty-three papers also stated that the achievement of FL leads to a healthy diet, better food and physical activity choices, and healthy behaviors (i.e., eat more vegetables or fruits, consume less soda and sweetened beverages, engage in more physical activity, increase spice use and decrease salt use, decrease serving sizes including fast food, reduce frequency of consumption of packaged and processed snacks, increase purchasing of fresh foods, and increase use of food labels when selecting foods) [3,10,11,16,[20][21][22][23][24]39,40,42,56,57,59,61,62,67,68,[70][71][72][73][74].…”

Promoting Food Literacy in Teens

“…Many adolescents reported not reading food labels because they did not know what to look for and also assumed that food labels were only important to those with special dietary needs. Adolescents acknowledged words they did not understand such as grams (Wickham & Carbone, 2018). They also had a negative reaction to food, based on ingredients on food labels that they believed would taste "nasty."…”

“…High food literacy in adolescents has been associated with improved eating of a healthy diet, including more fruits and vegetables and less fast food (Vaitkeviciute, Ball, & Harris, 2015). Adolescents, however, generally have limited food literacy skills, lacking the ability to use food knowledge and skills to plan, manage, select, prepare and eat healthy foods (Wickham & Carbone, 2018). Instead, adolescents increasingly consume fast food meals and processed snacks away from home, contributing to the rising rates of obesity in adolescents in the United States (Larson, Miller, Watts, Story, & Neumark-Sztainer, 2016).…”