Leslie Rodriquez: In the News

"...we are trying to change people's behaviors," says Vicki Beck, who runs the "Hollywood, Health & Society" project at the University of Southern California.

Indications are that the collaboration is working and that TV -- beset though it may be by online competition -- is still a powerful shaper of health habits.

For example, viewers of Telemundo's "Amarte Asi" were more likely to exercise, eat more healthfully or take other action to prevent disease after the telenovela included diabetes in a 2005 story line, according to preliminary research by Leslie Rodriquez, a University of Georgia doctoral candidate in public health.