KALEDO, A NEW EDUCATIONAL BOARD-GAME FOR NUTRITION EDUCATION: CLUSTER RANDOMIZED TRIAL OF HEALTHY LIFESTYLE PROMOTION

Introduction: Early prevention of obesity and overweight requires an intervention during childhood and adolescence. Since, at that age, game appears to be an appropriate tool to teach nutrition knowledge and to influence dietary behaviour, the new educational board-game Kaledo was tested for promoting a healthy diet and lifestyle in children. Methods: A two group design (treatment and control) with 1 pre-intervention assessment and 2 post-intervention assessments after 6 and 18 months was used. School was the unit of recruitment and random assignment to groups. During a 20 weeks period, once a week, a group of 1076 students (10 schools) participated to 15–30 minute-long play sessions with Kaledo. The control group (1081 students from 9 schools) did not participate in any play session with Kaledo. Changes in diet and physical activity were evaluated through validated questionnaires (Turconi et al. 2003; Johnson et al. 2002) collected at the 3 assessment times. At the same time, anthropometric measurements were performed in order to evaluate changes in the body mass index of the participants. Results: In the two post-intervention assessments, the treated group obtained significant better scores than the control in the questionnaire sections labelled “Nutrition Knowledge”, “Healthy and Unhealthy Diet and Food”, “Food Habits Checklist”, “Physical Activity and Lifestyle” and “Food Habits”. Remarkably, the treated group showed a significant lower mean BMI z-score with respect to the control group. Conclusion: Our results show that Kaledo could be an effective and powerful tool for nutrition education.