By STEVE BINDER
Illinois Correspondent

URBANA, Ill. — Fighting the U.S. obesity problem requires an attack plan that addresses nutrition, family life, health science, economics and child development. At least that’s the strategy behind a new program at the University of Illinois that combines a Ph.D. with a master’s in public health degree, focused on child obesity prevention.

Funded with a $4.5 million grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the research program is called the Illinois Transdisciplinary Obesity Prevention Program, or I-TOPP.

“This exciting new program allows us to develop novel hypotheses and approaches as researchers come together from their individual areas of expertise to solve the problem of child obesity,” said Sharon Donovan, a food science and human nutrition professor who will serve as the I-TOPP director.
Students in the program, beginning this fall, will be expected to think in broad terms when addressing the growing problem of child obesity. Portion sizes and what children eat are significant aspects of addressing the problem, but not the only ones.

“None of us as individuals has the expertise to cover the entire landscape,” Donovan noted.

The new degree will integrate research in nutrition, child development and family studies, physical activity, public health science and practice, economics, practices in child care centers and the effects of media. Students will develop and test interventions to prevent childhood obesity, Donovan said.
I-TOPP Co-director Barbara Fiese said the program has been set up so students will have multiple advisers. Faculty will help them create new types of research programs that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

“We can’t yet envision the research programs of the next generation of scientists. They’ll learn to ask the kinds of questions and think in ways that we haven’t been trained to do,” Fiese explained. “This program really puts us on the cutting-edge of what graduate education should look like.”
Fiese, Donovan and the I-TOPP team will gauge how the new scholarship program will affect the students’ critical thinking, investigation, writing skills and where they end up in their career. Donovan believes I-TOPP students will be positioned to take leadership roles in academic, medical, nonprofit and government institutions.

The program’s start is timely, connected to the USDA’s new national marketing campaign, MyPlate, which replaces the former “food pyramid.” MyPlate incorporates seven key messages: enjoy food but eat less; avoid oversized portions; make half your plate fruits and vegetables; drink water instead of sugary drinks; make at least half your grains whole grains; switch to fat-free or low-fat milk; and choose foods with low sodium.