TAS promotes healthy habits, endorsing cooking as basic tool to improve eating habits and the promotion of physical activity through active leisure.
Implementing effective and evidence-based intervention programs to promote physical activity (PA) and healthy eating (HE) among adolescents means properly designing interventions from the outset to thoroughly assess their effectiveness in changing behavior. TAS Program is based on the idea that adolescence is a time to instill and sustain healthy lifestyles. And was designed as a healthy lifestyle promotion educational program, with a strong evaluation component to assess its impact on dietary and PA behavioral changes. TAS is focused on teenagers because few programs have been specifically designed to target this age group. The program is built upon the premise that changing lifestyle habits among young people is not easy. To improve lifestyles, teenagers themselves must play an active role in the program. TAS program is not only based on giving nutritional information or explaining the benefits of doing regular PA but is also focused on providing tools that everyone can adapt to their lifestyle. So, the methodology used, make the subject of the study an active part of the same intervention process, through the participation of cooking and active leisure workshops. To reach all the schools, we designed the TAS plaform, with which teachers can develop the program in a more autonomy way. It offers teachers different educational itineraries with a series of planned sessions and all the material prepared to work on the students' HE and PA in a practical and motivating way.
Resources needed
From 2012 to 2018 TAS program was financed from the Mondelez International Foundation for an amount of 1,400,000.00 €, devoted to: design the program, support a team of 10 professionals, materials and interventions in the schools, data collection and evaluation and development of the TAS platform.
Evidence of success
Eeating habits (EH) and physical activity (PA) were measured before and after the intervention to prove the effectiveness of the program. The results obtained in the post-intervention period indicated a significant improvement in fruit and vegetable consumption, a moderately increased intake of fish and legumes, a decreased intake of fried foods, soft drinks and pastries, and an improvement in all PA aspects. So, TAS is proven as an effective secondary school-based healthy lifestyle program.
Potential for learning or transfer
Transition from childhood to adolescence is usually characterized by a critical decline of healthy diet behavior, and can be predictive of future pathological conditions, but it is also the period where young people need to become aware about the responsibility in their own food choice and healthy habits. In this sense, the potential for learning or transfer would be:
- Educating is prevent.
- Adolescence is a key moment for the acquisition of good habits.
- The school is the proper place to work with young people.
- Young people must be the managers of their own changes and the designers of their proposals for improvement
- Use the cooking workshops as a tool to teach how to eat better
- Involve the families in the program.
Learning to cook and be involved in home meal preparation is one of the best ways to improve eating habits and to corroborate that promote active leisure as a way to increase physical activity is a good strategy to achieve it.
Tags: Education, Empowerment, Food, Good practice, Health, Schools, Solutions, Well-being, Youth
