The Iowa State Department of Health and Human Performance has been awarded a $57,000 grant to study the effectiveness of a health challenge.

The 5+5 Challenge was a program implemented to get participants to “spend at least 30 minutes for five or more days a week in physical activity, and to ingest at least five fruits and vegetables daily,” said Warren Franke, assistant professor of health and human performance.

The challenge, which was issued last June, began with a committee consisting of Franke and representatives from Ames Parks & Recreation, McFarland Clinic and the local community.

The Center for Disease Control gave the Iowa Department of Public Health the grant this month to study the impact of the challenge, Franke said.

That grant was then subcontracted to the health and human performance department and the McFarland Clinic.

The study will primarily be conducted via telephone. “I’m working with the statistics laboratory on campus and they’re going to make telephone interviews of participants in the program,” Franke said.

The researchers will ask participants questions and mark answers on questionnaires that will be collated and analyzed, he said.

Researchers will contact about 250 people who participated in the program and about 300 who did not, Franke said.

Participants will be identified with the help of individual site coordinators, who promoted the challenge in their workplaces. Researchers will call Ames residents who did not participate in the program to serve as a “control group,” Franke said.

Franke said he expects the data collection to take about a month, with analysis immediately following. “It will probably take a little longer to analyze,” he said.

The results of the study could have a national impact, Franke said.

“The Center for Disease Control has a significant interest in the outcome for this study as it may serve as a model for other programs of this sort,” he said. “It’s conceivable that Iowa is leading the way … that Iowa’s 5+5 Challenge will serve as a model that the rest of the nation will follow,” Franke said.