Part of the SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions Toolkit.*
Husky Nutrition On-the-Go: Sugary Drink Reduction (SDR) is a direct education intervention designed to reduce sugary drink consumption among three to five-year-old children enrolled in early childhood education (ECE) programs by changing primary caregiver knowledge, motivation, and behaviors. SDR is a 10-week, brief interaction program developed for implementation during child pick-up times at ECE programs located in SNAP-Ed eligible communities. The curriculum includes 10 nutrition education modules centered around eight discrete messages about the information, motivation, or skills needed to understand why and how to decrease sugary drink consumption in a child’s diet. Each week, the parent encounters an activity to apply knowledge and skills learned at a display board, repetition of a targeted message for the week, informational handouts, and a gift to reinforce that message. A series of short videos that reinforce SDR messages has also been developed for social media. Each week of the program, students enrolled in a university service-learning course set up the weekly display board at participating ECE centers and greet parents when they pick up their children.
During SDR development, the School Readiness Coalition of over 60 ECE centers and parents of young children in the target communities participated in focus groups, interviews, and surveys about the approach, content, and delivery of the program. Additionally, a randomized control trial funded by the USDA Childhood Obesity Prevention Initiative evaluated the effectiveness of the intervention. The primary instruments used to evaluate intervention effectiveness include a participant demographics form, child weekend food record/recall, and the Information, Motivation, Behavior Survey (Goodell et al. 2012). The Information, Motivation, Behavior Survey, additional instruments (Pierce et al 2011 & 2012; Coleman et al. 2011) used in the formative evaluation phase of the project, and other publications can be found within the SDR’s publication page. The logic model guiding the program, the intervention model articulated for sugary drink consumption, and copies of evaluation instruments can be found on the evidence/research link on the SNAP4CT Husky Nutrition Curriculum webpage.
*SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions: An Obesity Prevention Toolkit for States is a compilation of interventions. The toolkit was developed by USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, The Association of SNAP-Ed Nutrition Education Administrators (ASNNA), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Training and Research Translation (Center TRT), and the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR), a partnership between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the USDA. It is designed and updated to help state SNAP-Ed administrative and implementing agencies identify evidence-based obesity prevention programs and policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) strategies and interventions to include in their SNAP-Ed plans.