October 17, 2011
Melissa Napolitano, PhD.
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Look around on any college
campus and you'll likely see hordes of students with heads down and
thumbs furiously tapping away on their smart phones. A new study from
Temple finds that this very act — texting and visiting Facebook — can
help college students lose weight.
The study, led by
Melissa Napolitano, an Associate Professor of Kinesiology and a
psychologist at the Center for Obesity Research and Education, compared
weight loss among a cohort of 52 college-age students, mostly women, who
were broken into three groups:
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- Facebook group — these participants visited a private Facebook page to get eating and exercise tips and viewed podcasts on how to improve diet and exercise routines.
- Facebook-plus group — participants visited the same page, but also received personalized, one-on-one feedback from a researcher via text messaging.
- Control group — participants received no diet or exercise advice and were put on a waiting list to participate in the program.
At the end of the eight-week study, students in the Facebook-plus group lost the most, an average of about five pounds. Although this weight loss is modest, Napolitano says that it is exciting, given that the program lacks a face-to-face component, because the losses approximate those often found in face-to-face weight loss programs on college campuses.
According to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, about 5.2 million college students are obese, a rate
that has risen 8 percent in the last 20 years. Research has found that
for many college students, weight gain starts small, about 5-7 pounds,
but increases steadily during their time in school.
“These results show that text messaging and
smart phones are powerful tools for delivering weight loss
interventions, particularly since these are technologies that most
college students have with them at all times," said Napolitano. "These
data provide initial signals towards the types of programs that could be
disseminated widely across college campuses given the high rates of
overweight and obesity."
Original Article published by Temple University
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