Media-Smart Youth: Eat, Think and Be Active!

Media-Smart Youth is an interactive education program that helps young people ages 11 to 13 better understand the media and how it can influence their health. These skills in turn can help them make smart and positive choices about nutrition and physical activity.

Developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the free Media-Smart Youth curriculum includes 10 interactive lessons on media, nutrition, and physical activity. In the program, youth analyze media messages, sample healthy snacks, and get moving during fun action breaks. They also create videos, banners, or other media products to encourage their peers to eat healthy and get active too. The NIH provides program facilitators with the materials to carry out the program, including free copies of program materials, training webinars, and technical assistance.

Media-Smart Youth aims to stimulate youth to think about physical activity and nutrition by developing an awareness of the link between media and health.

A randomized group experimental design indicated that youth who participated in the program displayed an overall increase in knowledge and skills in nutrition, physical activity, media awareness, and media analysis compared with youth in the groups who did not participate. There was a significant difference between the groups that participated in the program and those that did not in terms of intent to do more weight-bearing activities in the month following the program. Participants in the program showed strong trend toward greater changes in intent to eat fewer high-fat snack foods, and to eat or drink more foods with calcium during the following month.