Healthy for Life is a school-based program for middle school students, which is designed to improve a variety of health behaviors, including alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use, nutrition, and sexual behaviors. The program includes an in-school component in combination with a peer leadership, family, and community component. Goals specific to sexuality include delaying sexual intercourse, increasing contraception use for sexually active teens, and reducing the risk of STDs and pregnancy. The program can either be implemented over a 12-week period during the seventh grade school year (the "intensive" program) or in 4-week components across 3 years (sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, the "age appropriate" program).

Healthy for Life was designed using a social influence model, which views health behaviors in the context of social interactions. This approach hypothesizes that adolescents make health behavior choices based on the meaning the behavior has within the context of their social settings or social group involvement. The program provides teens with skills to manage social situations where others in the social group expect the adolescent to engage in high-risk behaviors.

At the tenth grade follow-up, students in the age appropriate program (36 percent of all participating students) and intensive program (33 percent) were more likely to have had sexual intercourse. Students in the control group (28 percent) had the lowest rate of sex. There was no significant difference between the intensive program and the control group or the intensive program and the age appropriate program. There were no differences between groups regarding condom use. Ninth grade data indicated that students in the program groups were about 1½ times more likely to have ever engaged in sexual intercourse than students in the control group. No differences were found when examining sexual intercourse in the last month. Tenth grade data showed no significant differences between program participants and control group members on ever having had sexual intercourse or sexual intercourse in the past month.