Educational Interventions and Evaluation for Obesity Prevention in Preschool Children in Local Communities

Educational interventions for obesity prevention from early childhood is one of the important measures in health promotion policies, especially in locations where obesity and overweight in school and preschool children are prevalent, such as in the Aomori Prefecture. The Aomori Prefecture government started a new demonstration project in FY 2014 that targeted children in nursing schools for the prevention of obesity through both population approaches (nutrition/physical activity education and nutrition management in lunch programs) and individual approaches to solving overweight in children. Our study group developed a data management tool to routinely accumulate data on measured body height and weight. We also developed educational materials with growth charts for nutritional education of guardians, and summary sheets showing the distributions of degree of obesity and prevalence of overweight/obesity in age-sex groups for use in assessment in each nursing school. To promote and evaluate the demonstration project, we offered the data management tool to all nursing schools in the prefecture for nutritional education and management in the nursing schools and asked them to anonymously submit data to build a prefecture-based monitoring dataset. Around 70% (310 institutes) of the institutes responded to this request, and we developed a longitudinal dataset with about 4,000 children in each of the 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old cohorts. This first revealed the prevalence of overweight in preschool children in the entire prefecture. The dataset will be further utilized for evaluating the effectiveness of educational interventions in preschool settings in local communities.