CDC Special Interest Projects (SIPs)

Project Gol (SIP 09-025), U48 DP001917-01

Project GOL works in collaboration with the Mexican National Institute of Public Health (Instituto Nacional de Salud Publica, INSP) to better understand, assess and develop evidence-based strategies and recommendations to effectively prevent obesity in Latin-American communities and populations. This collaboration provides the unprecedented opportunity of coordinating international efforts to identify evidence-based best practices in obesity prevention.

Over the next four years, Project GOL will continue to build partnerships between institutions on both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border to develop research and recommendations for preventing obesity among Latino populations. The study is organized into three major phases, which aim to:

1. Examine and synthesize published literature related to policy-, community-, and organizational-change strategies to promote physical activity and healthy diets.
2. Develop a set of recommendations for the primary prevention of obesity aimed at Latino populations, both in the U.S. and Mexico.
3. Implement and evaluate community demonstration projects, based on the translation and tailoring of identified evidence-based strategies.

Project GOL addresses the need to develop evidence-based strategies of obesity prevention which are culturally-sensitive to Latino populations on both sides of the border. Latinos are the largest and fastest growing ethnically diverse group in the United States, and they are also one of the most overweight. As the obesity epidemic sees no borders, Mexico closely follows the U.S. in suffering the worst epidemic of obesity in the world, a rise largely due to a rapid change in dietary habits and increase in sedentary behavior over the past decades.

• CDC website story featuring Project Gol