American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine 151 Health Promotion in Latinos

vol. 4 • no. 2 Strategies that successfully promoted sustainability in this review include training peer leaders to run educational sessions and establishing walking groups. Abstract: This article provides a review of health promotion research conducted among Latinos. The authors examined 31 intervention studies pro-moting physical activity and/or healthy diet in Latino samples. Overall, find-ings suggested that Latinos are respon-sive to interventions promoting physical activity and healthy diet, despite fac-ing numerous barriers to health promo-tion. In fact, 12 of the 21 studies that measured physical activity and 19 of the 26 studies that measured dietary behavior reported that the interven-tion produced significant improve-ments in those health behaviors. Design strengths of these studies included the high rates of retention and large num-ber of randomized controlled trials. However, there were concerns regard-ing the lack of diversity in the samples (mostly Mexican American women), limiting the generalizability of the find-ings and the underutilization of objec-tive measures of physical activity and diet behavior in intervention studies