The students in the "Food and Society" course also felt more strongly about the importance of the environment, animal rights and the need for a healthy diet at the end of the quarter than did the students in the comparison classes. The researchers acknowledge that the students in the "Food and Society" class were likely to be more open to the environmental and social messages - they had chosen to take the course - but the four groups of students did not differ in their eating or attitudes at the beginning of the quarter, and the authors said the strategy to improve healthier behavior could be tailored to different issues.

Eric Hekler, PhD, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, said the improvements made by the Stanford students show why it's important for health researchers to think more broadly about effective ways to encourage behavior changes. "It seems like we don't often enough think about our audience," he said.

Getting young adults to establish healthy habits is important, Hekler said, because many of those habits will persist well into adulthood. Because people in this age group are at high risk for gaining weight and the beginnings of weight-related heart disease, he said it's crucial to come up with more effective approaches for reducing those risks.

"This approach looks very promising," Robinson said. "There are a lot of reasons why we believe the stealth interventions will produce longer-term, more sustained effects that are of a greater magnitude than other strategies that have been tried in the past."

Robinson is employing similar strategies to boost exercise among children and adolescents, such as offering afterschool ethnic-dance classes for adolescent girls, and encouraging youngsters to reduce the amount of energy they consume by walking and biking to activities rather than being driven in a car.

Source: Stanford University Medical Center