Nutrition Able: Improving and Assessing Nutritional Literacy of Middle School Children in a Food Desert

BackgroundOverweight and obesity are leading contributors to chronic disease in Bexar County, with deficiencies in health education playing a central role in their prevalence. Nutrition Able is a medical student-led community initiative from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) designed to improve nutritional literacy among school-aged children and to pilot a novel assessment instrument. As part of the intervention, the Nutrition Able team delivers classroom-based educational sessions focused on understanding the futrition facts label. To evaluate the impact of this intervention, the Nutrition Able Literacy Assessment (NALA)--a 7-item pre/post survey--was developed to measure functional knowledge of core nutritional concepts. In its pilot, NALA demonstrated consistent performance, aligning with known trends in nutritional literacy literature and offering high-throughput assessment with minimal time burden. Pilot results revealed that attending school in a food desert was associated with lower baseline NALA scores, and subjects at the extremes of BMI had lower performance, with the highest performance in the overweight/obese categories. Female students scored higher when the session was led by a female presenter, suggesting that educator-student demographic concordance may influence educational outcomes. Post-intervention scores improved across all groups, supporting the effectiveness of both the educational session and the NALA instrument in capturing knowledge gains. In conclusion, Nutrition Able improves youth understanding of nutrition label information, and the NALA tool shows promise as a brief, scalable instrument for evaluating nutrition literacy in public health and clinical settings. These findings also highlight the potential impact of educator demographics on health education outcomes, suggesting that demographically matched educators may enhance intervention efficacy.