Translating evidence based violence and drug use prevention to obesity prevention: development and construction of the pathways program.

Effective school-based obesity prevention programs are needed to prevent and reduce the growing obesity risk among youth. Utilizing the evidence-rich areas of violence and substance use prevention, translation science may provide an efficient means for developing curricula across multiple health behaviors. This paper introduces Pathways to Health, a school-based obesity prevention program that was developed by translating from evidence-based violence and drug use prevention programs, Promoting Alternative THinking Strategies and the Midwestern Prevention Project STAR (STAR). We illustrate how a hypothesized underlying behavior change mechanism in two domains of risk behavior, violence and substance use, can be applied to obesity prevention. A 4-step translational process is provided and may be relevant for use in developing other curricula to address multiple health risk behaviors. Practical application and decision points are also provided.