4. Discussion
Health-related behaviors
The primary objective of the present study was to assess whether it is possible to simultaneously influence healthy eating and substance use prevention through a parenting intervention for Hispanic parents with 6th–8th-grade adolescents. The current study provides evidence that engaging parents in a healthy eating and substance use prevention school-based parenting intervention yielded positive, albeit small, changes in dietary intake among parents and their children and maintained relatively consistent substance use prevention outcomes among adolescents when compared to the original intervention without the nutrition component. Health-related behaviors, including dietary habits, are often established during childhood through parenting practices and behavior management [Nutrition-related FPNG+ content encouraged an increasing intake of fruit, vegetables, and whole grains [The FPNG+ intervention encouraged reducing the intake of added sugars [Whereas the present study was not powered for substance use outcomes due to COVID-19-driven interruptions in study implementation, the preliminary results suggest that adding dietary behavior content to the intervention did not detract from the prevention messages and effects for adolescent substance use. The FPNG+ intervention had comparable effect sizes in reducing and preventing adolescent substance use and lowering intentions to use substances compared to the original FPNG intervention. At T2, the FPNG+ intervention showed larger effect sizes for personal norms against substance use than FPNG.These findings contribute to theory development by demonstrating that intervening with the family at the microsystem [This research has several limitations worth noting. Diet and substance use data were collected via self-administered surveys, which introduces several sources of bias because of them being self-reported. The current analysis also relied on estimates of intake derived from a short screener developed for the general population that may not have the most representative foods consumed by the target population. Whereas we realize there are important limitations with this methodology, we selected this instrument to reduce participant burden and to ease data collection in a community-based setting, particularly because our targeted sample size was larger than what we were able to attain. However, we had to halt study implementation with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a smaller sample than originally planned. This in turn limits the power to detect statistical differences and control for baseline differences in adolescent gender in our models as well as make any final statistical conclusions about the efficacy of the intervention related to preventing adolescent substance use. Finally, the FPNG+ parenting intervention has a somewhat limited nutrition scope, which may have contributed to the small magnitude of observed changes.