Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Hispanic youth have the highest risk for obesity, making this population a key priority for early childhood interventions to prevent the development of adult obesity and its consequences. Involving parents in these interventions is essential to support positive long-term physical activity and nutrition habits. Interventions in the past have engaged parents by providing information about nutrition and fruit and vegetable intake through written materials or text such as newsletters and text messages. The Sustainability via Active Garden Education (SAGE) intervention used gardening and interactive activities to teach preschool children ages 3-5 about healthy eating and physical activity. It aimed to increase physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake in preschool children as well as improve related parenting practices. The intervention utilized newsletters to engage parents by promoting opportunities to increase physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake for their children at home. The newsletters also encouraged parents to discuss what was learned during the SAGE lessons with their children. The purpose of this paper is to describe the content of the newsletters and determine the parent perception of the newsletters through parent survey responses. This can help inform future childhood obesity interventions and parent engagement.

The NCAA is changing the current rules and regulations around a student-athlete’s name, image, and likeness. Previously, student-athletes were not allowed to participate in business activities or noninstitutional promotional activities. With the new rule changes, student-athletes will be able to engage in business activities related to their own name, image, and likeness. The goal of the team was to help “prepare athletes to understand and properly navigate the evolving restrictions and guidelines around athlete name, image, and likeness”. In order to accomplish this, the team had to understand the problems student-athletes face with these changing rules and regulations. The team conducted basic market research to identify the problem. The problem discovered was the lack of communication between student-athletes and businesses. In order to verify this problem, the team conducted several interviews with Arizona State University Athletic Department personnel. From the interviews, the team identified that the user is the student-athletes and the buyer is the brands and businesses. Once the problem was verified and the user and buyer were identified, a solution that would best fit the customers was formulated. The solution is a platform that assists student-athletes navigate the changing rules of the NCAA by providing access to a marketplace optimized to working with student-athletes and offering an ease of maintaining relationships between student-athletes and businesses. The solution was validated through meetings with interested brands. The team used the business model and market potential to pitch the business idea to the brands. Finally, the team gained traction by initiating company partnerships.

Circadian misalignments in terms of eat and sleep cycles, common occurrences among college students, are linked to adverse health outcomes. Time-restricted feeding, a form of intermittent fasting, may offer an exciting, non-pharmacologic approach to improve the health of this population by restricting eating to feeding windows that align with circadian biology. This study aims to fill a gap in the literature regarding the effect of early time-restricted feeding (eTRF) on college students, particularly in regard to diet quality, diet self-efficacy, and sleep quality. To test the hypothesis that eTRF would lead to an increase in all three variables, a 4-wk randomized-controlled, parallel arm trial was conducted. Thirty-five healthy college students were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the intervention group (TRF) was instructed to adhere to an 8-h feeding window aligned with the light cycle (9 am to 5 pm), and the control group (CON) was instructed to adhere to a 12-h feeding window typical of college students (10 am to 10pm). The eTRF diet was consumed ad libitum, and the participants were not instructed to avoid compensatory hyperphagia. The results showed a strong, reverse effect of eTRF on diet quality: fasting had a highly significant association with decreased diet quality. The results suggest that, under free-living conditions, college students practicing eTRF are more likely to compensate for prolonged fasting with unhealthy eating and snacking.

The concept of Nature Made Candles was to “educate candle lovers on the importance of knowing what is in the candle. Everyone should know what they are inhaling...no matter how nice (or not) it smells. Earth needed a candle for enjoying scents and sights without hindering health, so we made one.” The objective evolved into educating the student population of Arizona State University (ASU) about what ingredients go into commercial candles, with a particular focus on the wax and scent, as well as giving students a free candle that emulated the holistic ingredients they were educated on. This project was designed to be a quality improvement and health promotion project with an emphasis on the ASU student population. The purpose of the project was to find a type of candle that was friendly to the lungs of all individuals who wanted candles in their household.