The Five Plus Nuts and Beans for Kidneys Study Reaches a Major Milestone
Many Black Americans face barriers to eating foods that are healthy, and poor diet can lead to high rates of high blood pressure, kidney disease, obesity and heart disease. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity’s “Five Plus Nuts and Beans for Kidneys” study explores whether coaching on food choices can improve kidney health and blood pressure among Black Americans who live in the Baltimore area.
BACKGROUND
Farmer Chippy, Community Advisory Board Member for the Five Plus Nuts and Beans for Kidneys study, featured by the Maryland Farm Bureau in their Winter 2021 periodical.
In the “Five Plus Nuts and Beans for Kidneys” study, participants are split into two groups. One group is “Coached” on making food choices. The other is “Self-Directed,” meaning they make their own choices about food without coaching. The Coached group receives a weekly grocery allowance of $30 for four months and ongoing help in selecting healthy foods each week for the length of the study. The Self-Directed group also receives the weekly $30 grocery allowance, but no coaching. Instead, they receive a brochure about healthy eating. After four months, the $30 grocery allowance is stopped for both groups. The study team looks at whether the coaching helps participants make better food choices than the group without coaching. The effects of the food choices for both groups are measured by checking participants’ kidney health and blood pressure. First launched in 2017, the study is expected to wrap up in 2021.
Research team member Karen White visits Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm to do some farming while being closely supervised by a Youth Program member of the Farm.
PROGRESS MADE TO DATE
In July 2021, we enrolled the last participant into the study, which was a major milestone we were happy to reach! The team is grateful to all the people who have volunteered to participate. We are especially thankful for the participants who trusted the strong public health safety measures we put in place for in-person study visits during the last year and a half. Their trust let the research move forward despite the COVID-19 crisis. We expect to complete collecting participant information by the end of this year.
We are also pleased to report that our Data and Safety Monitoring Board met earlier this year to review the Five Plus study’s progress and voted to continue the study with no changes.
Safely saying farewell to our devoted study team members during a luncheon in their honor.
In other news, we held a virtual meeting with the study’s Community Advisory Board early this year and welcomed our newest Board member Richard Francis, best known as “Farmer Chippy.” Farmer Chippy operates the Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm, which gives farm fresh food out to over 1,000 families in Baltimore. Some study team members and Farmer Chippy were recently awarded a grant to describe the food distribution program. The grant will allow us to collect information about the communities the program serves, how they access the farm fresh food, and their views on whether it improves their health. We expect this work to begin in the Fall of 2021.
In addition to our work on the main study, we continued our work on three related projects looking at food choices and the availability of healthy food in certain locations.
One of these projects was a PhotoVoice Project led by Dr. Anika Hines. In this project, research volunteers took pictures and made comments about the markets, gardens and other sources of food for people in Baltimore-area neighborhoods. These pictures and statements revealed how easy or hard it was to get healthy food in these places. The PhotoVoice materials were included in both a cookbook and an informational graphic handout that were given to the study volunteers. An event to share these findings with the public is planned for later in 2021.
The Five Plus team also looked at data from two other related studies and sent early results to a national conference on kidney disease. The first project looked at the grocery receipts from purchases made by the Self-Directed group during the Five Plus Nuts and Beans for Kidneys study to see what types of food were purchased with their grocery allowance. The second project tried to identify common themes from interviews with people who completed the Five Plus study. The focus of these interviews was to learn about what helped and did not help them eat healthfully during the study. We will offer more updates on these related studies in the next newsletter.
Departing team members, left to right: Zehui, Tahiyat, Denise, Chiazam and Sophia.
Finally, we proudly congratulate a number of our research team members who recently reached personal milestones of their own! Sophia Lou graduated from Johns Hopkins with her Bachelor’s degree in May and began a training program at the National Institutes of Health. Chiazam Omenyi and Tahiyat Sheikh entered medical school this Summer. Zehui Zhou and Denise Saint-Jean began working on their Master’s Degrees, and Denise plans to continue to medical school next year. The study has benefitted enormously from all of their work and we cannot wait to see what their futures hold.