Testing a school-based program to promote digital health literacy and healthy lifestyle behaviours in intermediate elementary students: The Learning for Life program.

Promoting digital health literacy and healthy lifestyle behaviours in children can lead to positive long-term health outcomes and prevent chronic diseases. However, there are few school-based interventions promoting this education to intermediate elementary students. The objective of this study was to test the effectiveness of a novel intervention to increase students' digital health literacy and health knowledge. Learning for Life is a classroom-based education program, developed for grade 4-7 students and delivered by teachers over six weeks. Three Canadian schools were recruited to deliver the intervention in 2018. This study had a pre-post design and no control group. Students' self-reported digital health literacy and healthy lifestyle behaviours were measured at pre-intervention (n = 126), post-intervention (n = 119), and two-month follow-up (n = 104). Students at pre-intervention had a mean (SD) age of 10.98 (0.56) years (57.1% females). Almost all (97%) students had unsupervised access to the Internet through a computer or smartphone. From pre- to post-intervention, students' digital health literacy increased (p = 0.009), but decreased from post-intervention to follow-up (p < 0.001). Post-intervention, the majority of students could identify at least one healthy behaviour (e.g., exercising one hour/day) and reported making at least one healthy change in their lives (e.g., eating more fruits/vegetables). This study demonstrated that the Learning for Life intervention can improve intermediate elementary students' digital health literacy over the short-term and help them learn and retain healthy lifestyle knowledge and behaviours. These findings affirm the need for interventions promoting digital healthy literacy and healthy lifestyle behaviours for this age group.

Listen and Speak: A Discussion of Weight Bias, its Intersections with Homophobia, Racism, and Misogyny, and Their Impacts on Health.

This article is a version of the Ryley-Jeffs Memorial Lecture, delivered on 8 June 2018. It discusses weight bias and the intersections with homophobia, racism, and misogyny, and how these impact health. While the dominant discourse attests that people can lose weight and keep it off, evidence informs us that maintenance of weight loss is unlikely. Using a flawed epistemological framework, obesity has been declared a disease, and weight bias been perpetuated. Weight bias is pervasive, both in the general public and amongst health professionals, often using inappropriate tools to assess the impact of weight on health. This contributes to overlooking the life circumstances that truly cause morbidity: social determinants of health such as income, social connectedness and isolation, adverse childhood experiences, and cultural erasure. A variety of tools dietitians can use to appropriately assess health risk are provided, along with examples of actions that can be taken to reduce weight bias. Dietitians who are leading the profession in taking action against weight bias and stigma are profiled.