Nutrition Knowledge for Spanish-speaking Parents

Providing child nutrition information is a major goal of every pediatric well-child visit.
Unfortunately, due to a wide array of issues, doing this effectively during clinic visits is
challenging and insufficient. It is because of this that some have looked for innovative
ways to enhance the delivery of this information. One such way is the use of touch screen
computer programs containing nutritional information. Several studies have documented the
value of patients receiving health information in such a manner.

Nonetheless, the use of this medium has not been well studied in Spanish-speaking care
providers of young children. The investigators recently conducted a study that evaluated
user's perception of the usability of such technology, finding that most users thought that
the touchscreen was easy to use, despite their low computer confidence levels. The
investigators also evaluated the impact of using nutrition modules on user's nutrition
knowledge, finding that immediately after use; participant's nutrition knowledge was
improved. I now propose to evaluate this technology further through a 4 armed randomized
controlled trial. The goal here is to evaluate the longer term impact of the educational
modules on nutrition knowledge and the impact, if any, of additional web access to the
modules, on longer term knowledge. A secondary goal is to better understand nutritional
habits in this population and perceptions of weight.