A culturally tailored, exercise-based intervention designed to reduce weight gain among low-income Latino children with overweight or obesity showed promise in the initial two years of a clinical trial, researchers are reporting.

In the study, called the Stanford GOALS trial, researchers randomly assigned a group of 241 Latino children from low-income neighborhoods in the Northern California area to either an intensive intervention program or a standard health education program for a total of three years. The children were 7-11 years old at the time of enrollment. The intensive intervention consisted of home environment changes, such as smaller plates of food, behavioral changes such as less screen time, and after-school team sports.  During the first two years, the children who received the intensive intervention showed improvements in body mass index and other health measures compared to children who received the standard intervention. However, the differences between the two groups were not statistically significant over the entire three years.

“The study provides evidence that it is efficacious to reduce weight gain and other cardiovascular risk factors in low-income children using multi-level, multi-component intervention approaches in multiple settings where children live, learn, and play,” said study co-author Charlotte Pratt, Ph.D., RD, a nutrition researcher with the NHLBI Division of Cardiovascular Sciences who is also an NHLBI project officer for the study. “This is an important and promising step in the fight against rising rates of childhood obesity in low income children and more research is needed.”

The study, funded in part by NHLBI, appeared in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.