El Plan de Exito: A culturally specific tool to encourage and support Latino immigrant families to make healthy lifestyle changes

In 2008, the federal government alone will spend more than $1 billion on nutrition education. Yet, the rate of obesity and diabetes among Latinos continues to climb reaching epidemic proportions. Even though nutrition education resources have been developed to address the problem, research shows that education alone is not enough to elicit behavior change. Therefore, El Plan de Exito (EPDE) was developed to help Latinos turn abstract concepts into behavior change, becoming the missing link between information and behavior change.

Method: EPDE was designed based on behavior change theory, assisting Latino immigrant families in developing a personalized plan to facilitate healthy behavior. EPDE is a worksheet that allows the individual to record personal goals, reasons for change, perceived barriers to change and specifically how they can address these barriers. It provides guidance and suggestions that are focused on the family unit as well as, environmental and psychosocial barriers specific to the Latino immigrant families. This tool helps the individual realize their source of motivation so that they may take concrete health information and translate that into healthy behavior change. After presenting a nutrition education intervention to 225 families, half of the families were guided through the behavior change process using EPDE while the other half were only encouraged to make the changes but not given EPDE.

Results: Preliminary results indicate that 60% of participants who were administered EPDE worksheet successfully implemented at least one selected behavioral change compared to only 13% of participants in the control group.