1. The purpose of the study was to assess how effective the MEND (Mind, Exercise, Nutrition, Do It!) program was in influencing obese children to adopt a healthier lifestyle (Sacher et al., 2010).
2. The study is designed as a randomized controlled trial, where the participants are able children (aged eight to twelve years) who were classified as obese according to their BMI (Sacher et al., 2010). After being assessed for their health data at baseline, participants were randomly selected to either immediately start the intervention or wait six months for it and act as controls for the study (Sacher et al., 2010). The randomization was done by an independent statistician, where sixty children immediately received the intervention, while fifty-six …show more content…
A strength of this study was the choice of its intervention, through its practicality and how easy it is to follow. Participants were slowly educated and motivated to make better choices over a span of nine weeks, thus presenting opportunity to make gradual, sustainable changes to improve one’s health. Along with this effective method (Freedman, 2011), the intervention incorporates behavioural techniques when educating its participants, and thus can be compared to highly successful programs such as Weight Watchers (Freedman, 2011). The ability to follow the intervention smoothly is further justified from the high average attendance of the program and the positive feedback from the participants (Sacher et al., 2010). Another strength of this study is its use of various measurements (such as waist circumference, BMI, and body composition) to properly assess improvement in physique (Sacher et al., 2010). Although BMI is commonly used to identify the overweight/obesity stage, it does not distinguish between body fat and muscle (Williams, 2016) nor account for growth spurts. Thus, it is unsuitable for children and those of higher muscle mass (Williams, 2016). By using other measurements (such as the ones previously mentioned alongside BMI), the researchers compensate for this shortcoming to properly describe improvements in physique. Moreover, this study addresses the shortcomings of the public health response to obesity (Salas, 2015) by measuring the relatively “underrated” …show more content…
A weakness of this study is choosing participants based only on BMI. As previously discussed, BMI does not distinguish between body fat and muscle, and it is not very suitable for children as it does not consider growth spurts (Williams, 2016). An improvement to this study would be to select participants based on their body fat percentage in addition to BMI, as those with an above acceptable body fat percentage are at higher risk for disease (Insel, Roth, Irwin, & Burke, 2016). Due to this risk, they would be ideal subjects for the study. Another weakness of this study is not involving parents in physical activity sessions of the program. Despite the program involving parents in its nutrition sessions, good nutrition is not often enough for good health. By seeing their parents becoming physically active, children are more likely to follow their example, as seen with Moy and his father in Bite Sized Documentary (Galdi, Gallegos & McAnany, 2014). Hence, an improvement for this study would be to involve the parents in physical activity sessions with their children. Moreover, a major weakness of this study would be using questionnaires to describe emotional health. Due to the data being self-reported, it is possible that participants could interpreted questions differently or did not tell the truth, thus creating error. A possible improvement would be to have mental health professionals work with the participants to make sense of their emotional states, and report their
2. The study is designed as a randomized controlled trial, where the participants are able children (aged eight to twelve years) who were classified as obese according to their BMI (Sacher et al., 2010). After being assessed for their health data at baseline, participants were randomly selected to either immediately start the intervention or wait six months for it and act as controls for the study (Sacher et al., 2010). The randomization was done by an independent statistician, where sixty children immediately received the intervention, while fifty-six …show more content…
A strength of this study was the choice of its intervention, through its practicality and how easy it is to follow. Participants were slowly educated and motivated to make better choices over a span of nine weeks, thus presenting opportunity to make gradual, sustainable changes to improve one’s health. Along with this effective method (Freedman, 2011), the intervention incorporates behavioural techniques when educating its participants, and thus can be compared to highly successful programs such as Weight Watchers (Freedman, 2011). The ability to follow the intervention smoothly is further justified from the high average attendance of the program and the positive feedback from the participants (Sacher et al., 2010). Another strength of this study is its use of various measurements (such as waist circumference, BMI, and body composition) to properly assess improvement in physique (Sacher et al., 2010). Although BMI is commonly used to identify the overweight/obesity stage, it does not distinguish between body fat and muscle (Williams, 2016) nor account for growth spurts. Thus, it is unsuitable for children and those of higher muscle mass (Williams, 2016). By using other measurements (such as the ones previously mentioned alongside BMI), the researchers compensate for this shortcoming to properly describe improvements in physique. Moreover, this study addresses the shortcomings of the public health response to obesity (Salas, 2015) by measuring the relatively “underrated” …show more content…
A weakness of this study is choosing participants based only on BMI. As previously discussed, BMI does not distinguish between body fat and muscle, and it is not very suitable for children as it does not consider growth spurts (Williams, 2016). An improvement to this study would be to select participants based on their body fat percentage in addition to BMI, as those with an above acceptable body fat percentage are at higher risk for disease (Insel, Roth, Irwin, & Burke, 2016). Due to this risk, they would be ideal subjects for the study. Another weakness of this study is not involving parents in physical activity sessions of the program. Despite the program involving parents in its nutrition sessions, good nutrition is not often enough for good health. By seeing their parents becoming physically active, children are more likely to follow their example, as seen with Moy and his father in Bite Sized Documentary (Galdi, Gallegos & McAnany, 2014). Hence, an improvement for this study would be to involve the parents in physical activity sessions with their children. Moreover, a major weakness of this study would be using questionnaires to describe emotional health. Due to the data being self-reported, it is possible that participants could interpreted questions differently or did not tell the truth, thus creating error. A possible improvement would be to have mental health professionals work with the participants to make sense of their emotional states, and report their