CATCH Program to Reduce Child Obesity

For an obesity prevention class I reviewed the CATCH program to reduce child obesity in schools. It's program components are pretty neat and it's been shown to be effective in Texas in a little as four years. Read on to find out more about it!

CATCH (or the Coordinated Approach to Child Health) has as its main goal creating healthy children and healthy school environments. It does this through an integrated team of elementary school principals, elementary school teachers, PE teachers, food service supervisors, and (when implemented with an accompanying community-based initiative) community representatives.

The program includes family fun nights/events, teacher-led activity breaks in school, social marketing efforts, CATCH community "best practices" workshops, a host of other training and coordination meetings, and a menu of options which communities can choose to include as part of their personal CATCH implementation. Some of these activities include providing opportunities for students to have a taste healthful foods, implementation of school gardening programs, implementation of physical activity breaks during classroom hours and organization of after-school physical activity programs. Because each community gets to choose the options that are right for them, this allows the program to tailor itself to specific community needs.

This program can be compared to Shape Up America, Be Active Eat Well, and other school-based obesity prevention programs. CATCH relies heavily on the recommendations for school health programs from the Division of Adolescent and School Health.

CATCH has measured success by lowering BMI measures from student self-reported height and weight. CATCH schools also show improvements in dietary choices as measured by the CATCH SPAN questionnaire. These effects are much more prominent when the CATCH program is implemented with its community-based component. This program has been demonstrated effective mostly among low-income schools.

If I were a principal struggling with a burden of obesity, I might look to CATCH for some answers...