Tailoring a Lifestyle Intervention to Address Obesity Disparities Among Men

Overview

If the investigators are to adequately address the health needs of African American and Latino men, both culture and gender must be considered when developing and implementing strategies to encourage weight loss and increase their healthy eating and physical activity.The aim of this project is to develop and test gendered, culturally and contextually relevant messages that will be used in a future, web- based tailored intervention to encourage healthy eating and physical activity in African American and Latino men. This study is part of a larger research agenda that for a decade has focused on understanding and reducing chronic disease risk among African American and Latino men. Because men are more likely than women to engage in over 30 behaviors known to increase their risk of injury, morbidity, and mortality, improving men's health requires understanding the social and cultural factors that help explain sex differences in health. Operationalizing gender in individually-tailored health communications has great potential to unlock the potential of health communications and interventions to engage and improve the health of men and particularly African American and Latino men. To date, no community-based intervention has produced clinically significant improvements in weight loss, healthy eating or physical activity in Latino and African American men. It also is unclear how technology can be used to promote these behaviors in this population. Thus, there is a need to develop healthy eating, physical activity and weight loss interventions specifically targeted and tailored to African American and Latino men that explores the utility of technology. This intervention content and focus represents a novel strategy to promote health equity by using technology-based health care innovations to improve healthy eating and active living by addressing a root cause of unhealthy behavior in men: notions of manhood. The investigators focus on gender and manhood because they are under-explored factors that shape men's health behaviors.

The overall aim of this study is to develop and pilot an individualized weight-loss intervention for obese middle-aged African American and Latino men and to explore how the genetically predicted BMI relates to outcomes. Using strategies previously employed by the PI to develop individually-tailored materials for African American men, the proposed study is designed to develop person-specific materials for Latino men (Specific Aim 1). Investigators also will pilot a behavioral weight loss intervention for 35-64 year old African American men in Nashville and Latino men in Miami (Specific Aims 2-3), and explore how the phenotypic expression of obesity shapes and is affected by behavioral and physiological changes (Specific Aim 4). The proposed intervention includes (a) person-specific goals/ messages (via web and text), (b) self-monitoring (via wearable device and text), (c) small group training and education (including social support) and (d) educational and community-based information and resources (via web and text).