Fort Peck Community College and American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) Clinical Trial Project
We offered our online nutrition (healthy diet) course as part of a clinical trial in collaboration with the Fort Peck Community College (FPCC). The course was used twice as an IRB approved nutrition intervention tool. Students taking our online course through FPCC received 3 units of nutrition science credit while significantly improving their diets.
Modification of the course for the purposes of serving the American Indian population was funded by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) with grant monies awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) eco-Ambassador program. To find out more about the project, please follow this link and see page 10 of the 2015 AIHEC eco-Ambassador report
Participation in the online nutrition (healthy diet) course resulted in significant reductions in risk factors for Type-2 diabetes during Year 2. Students who participated in the online course significantly reduced their intake of processed foods and had significantly lower fasting glucose and inorganic mercury levels compared to the students in the group who were only asked to reduce their intake of corn sweeteners. Resuts of the clinical trial are presented in a manuscript that was published by the Integrative Molecular Medicine journal in 2015. The manuscript may be downloaded free of charge at the National Institutes of Health. The link is here Blood inorganic mercury is directly associated with glucose levels in the human population and may be linked to processed food intake.
To see a video presentation of some of our findings of the clinical trial at Fort Peck during year 2 of the study (2013), visit the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. To access the video, click on this link - Patterns of Health and Wellbeing: The Medicine of Food.
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