By Bianca Barr and Erin Calandra, Penn State
Penn State Outreach, along with researchers from the colleges of medicine, health and human development and agricultural sciences, are building relationships with children and their parents in the Bald Eagle Area School District in Centre County, Pa., in hopes of combating childhood obesity.
The community-based research project is titled “Connecting Families and Schools for Healthy Eating and Active Living.” The study has been under way for about two years and the people involved hope that funding will allow them to follow the participants until high school graduation.
So far, the children participating in the study have reduced their collective body mass index (BMI) results by more than 10 percent. The numbers are now lower than the state average of nearly 19 percent.
