About
The present project aimed to design, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of a healthy eating promotion intervention. HEP-S (Promoting Healthy Eating through Self-Regulation) is a program aimed at promoting healthy eating in elementary school children using narratives to develop self-regulation skills. Self-regulation refers to a set of processes that allow individuals to control personal, behavioral, and environmental influences that impact their behavior, including eating behavior. Self-regulation is a process within the individual's purview; it can be taught and therefore improved upon. The focus of this project is not on transmitting knowledge about healthy eating per se, but on promoting the development of a set of skills and strategies across the domain of healthy lifestyle habits. This focus was chosen because beliefs about healthy eating have a greater influence on eating behavior than factual knowledge about food. At the heart of this intervention are narratives: a very important educational tool that fosters children's development. Narratives allow the reader to reflect on themselves and their behavior through the characters that compose them. Narratives also stimulate debate and the discovery of new perspectives on how to face everyday dilemmas. It is expected that by using stories to initiate discussion and reflection, a change in belief systems will occur, which in turn will trigger behavioral change. The intervention took place in a school context in two different formats: traditional in-person and online. Considering that there is a growing need today to dematerialize processes so that interventions reach more people at a lower cost, it became urgent to test the possibility of an online version of the present project.
