1. State your health outcome of interest. (It could be the one you used for week #2 or another one.) Pick two key behaviors that are important factors leading to your health outcome. Explain the importance of these behaviors either for etiology, prevention, or intervention. (If none of the behaviors in the readings are important for your health outcome, suggest another behavior that is.)
For today’s assignment, I would like to focus on the health outcome, obesity, and discuss about the important contributing behavioral factors such as diet and self-control. Cognitive self-control can be negatively influenced by an accumulation of various environmental risk factors such as exposure to neighborhood crime, domestic violence or any other childhood adverse events. Deterioration of self-control can then play a role in poor diet choices, which ultimately will lead to the poor health outcome of obesity. In addition to the lack of self-control, other factors such as distance or ease of access to the supermarkets versus fast food outlets can also affect the choice of diet for an individual. Therefore, strong educational health programs, increase physical extracurricular activities as well as displacement of fast-foods at schools are vital for addressing the increase in prevalence of obesity seen in the United States.
2. Describe how you would study the role of one of the behaviors described for question #1 and your health outcome of interest. Incorporate a social factor (e.g. race/ethnicity, social exclusion, stress) in the study approach.
I would investigate how deterioration of self-control based on cumulative adverse childhood events (ACE’s) are associated with increased risk of obesity via the use of data collected from a nationwide registry on childhood obesity (i.e. possibly the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research) and a registry of children with normal BMI’s as controls. Both surveillance programs or databases should include detailed questionnaires of adverse childhood events as well as reports of any other addictive behaviors from the individual and/or their parents. I would then separate the participants into different groups based on the number of ACE’s as well as rates of addictive behaviors and compare the groups with regard to their health outcomes.
3. If key health behaviors (e.g. smoking, exercise, nutritious diet) are strongly influenced by neighborhood, income, and/or education, do we need to continue to study how these behaviors influence health outcomes? Why or why not?
I believe that the ongoing research in the effects of these mentioned health behaviors and the contributing societal factors are vital for continual propagation of public health goals and growth of educational policies. Furthermore, priorities and definitions of “strong association” between these health behaviors and outcomes differ greatly among countries and even state, cities and provinces around the world.