Masters project being offered

• Type of project being offered: Primary qualitative data collection and analysis.

• Background

  The increasing prevalence of overweight children and adolescents poses a major concern worldwide. Dietary practice in childhood has consequences in later life. Therefore acquiring healthy eating behaviors that will endure is important for children and adolescents. Diverse forms of nutrition education and counseling, key messages, a Mediterranean-style hypocaloric diet, and nutritional food selection have been implemented as dietary interventions. However, it is not easy to identify the effectiveness of these schemes of any multicomponent approach. In this study, a simple and cheap method has been adopted. Families are introduced to a commercial 'foodbox' scheme at a reduced cost price which they will collect each week over the study period. The foodboxes are not modified for this target group. The foodboxes contain meals to be prepared according to a menu which covers most of the week. The scheme has proven to be acceptable to participating families and has been repeated for a second period with new families

• Objectives

  This masters project will describe the dietary risk factors and nutritional components of this intervention for nutritional management in childhood obesity. The objective of the project will be to lead to evidence-based practice in nutrition care for obese children and adolescents by considering obesity-related individual and environmental dietary risk factors.

• Working group:

  You will be working with a small team of clinicians and public health professionals to collect and analyse qulitative data from a public health scheme which aims to regularise the food habits and wellness of families with overweight children and empower them towards healthy eating and exercise.

• Several projects might be possible in this area

• # Project 1: to investigate the usage of a foodbox project for families with overweight children in Kungsbacka.
• _# Project 2: to carry out a qualitative study of the importance of the Wellness Group from the parents perspective in Laholm and Kungsbacka.

• You will be:

  interested in nutrition and obesity in pediatric populaitons

• Experience to be gained:

  Practical issues related to the health interventions in a community setting.
• _

  Supervisor:

  John Chaplin Associate Professor. Inst. for Clinical Sciences, GU. Contact: