Never mind that the country has a half a billion dollar deficit and almost $19 trillion debt — there is obesity to be discussed!
Hence, the National Institutes of Health granted Becky Marquez, an assistant professor at the University of California at San Diego, over $143,000 to “to give ‘communication competency’ to Mexican-American women about obesity and working out.”
“Given the relationship between obesity and cardiovascular disease, it is imperative that intervention studies address weight management among Mexican-American women, a group disproportionately affected by obesity,” the grant states.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
“Because communication among family members can impact health behaviors, promoting communication that facilitates healthy eating and physical activity could help build an interpersonal environment that supports weight management among mothers and daughters,” the grant continues. “An intervention that addresses communication competency is especially warranted for Latino families as dissonance in acculturation between parent and child can interfere with effective communication and increase conflict.”
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The project will create a “weight management intervention” with “communication training” to provide Mexican-American women and their daughters “reciprocal support for healthy eating and physical activity behaviors.”
The study, which will continue through December 2020, has cost taxpayers $143,002.
The project will also track weight changes of the study’s participants, and their “weight-related behaviors.”
“We expect weight loss and improvements in diet, physical activity, and psychosocial variables, such as social support, to be significantly associated with improvements in communication,” the grant said.
But before you roll your eyes too much, consider what else the NIH has spent taxpayer cash on: $407,000 “to tell Latino men to exercise over text messages,” and half a million “to teach doctors how to talk to fat kids.”
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