Earlier this week, we looked at a collection of recently published research papers linking healthy eating to mental health and well being. Now, we’ve found a new report proposing a super-simple way to get kids to eat more fresh fruits and veggies. Just put more on their plates!
A happy mom whose kids eat lots of fresh fruits and veggies
Who knew it was that simple? Nobody, apparently, until researchers tried out a couple of new approaches to presenting fruits and veggies to reluctant eaters.
A team at Penn State University found it takes a certain amount of coercion and a lot of finesse to get kids to eat the right combination of foods. That combination is defined. Currently, by the ‘formula’ being promoted by the U.S. FDA and Canada’s Good Guide: half the plate full of fresh fruits and veggies, a quarter devoted to whole grains, and another quarter to lean protein.
A recent report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says about 60 percent of U.S. children don’t eat enough fruit and 93 percent don’t eat enough vegetables. So the question is not just a matter of curiosity.
What they did
According to an abstract of the report: “For the study, the researchers recruited 53 children between the ages of three and five who were enrolled in Pennsylvania childcare centers. Each participant was served all their meals and snacks for five days during three different periods in a random order.”
Two strategies were tested.
“The first was simply adding 50 percent more to fruit and vegetable side dishes at kids’ meals throughout the day. The second was substituting 50 percent more fruits and vegetables for an equivalent weight of the other foods. For example, if they added 50 grams of veggies to the lunch meal, they also subtracted 50 grams of mac-and-cheese.”
What they found
The results were nothing short of amazing. The team found that adding more fruit and vegetables resulted in the kids eating 24 percent more veggies and 33 percent more fruit compared to the control (no changes) menus. Substituting fruits and veggies for some of the other foods resulted in kids consuming 41 percent more veggies and 38 percent more fruit.
The takeaway
“When deciding what to feed kids, it’s easy to remember that half of the food should be fruits and vegetables,” team leader Dr. Barbara Rolls says. “If you start seeing that you’re serving too much and have more waste, you could cut back the higher calorie-dense food while adding more produce. Experiment and have some fun trying different fruits and vegetables to see what they like and so you can serve meals with a sensitivity to their personal taste.”
My take
Okay. Sounds great! I have no doubts that increasing fruit and veggie intake will be healthier for kids. But why do the kids eat more fruits and veggies under the regimens proposed by the researchers? It’s common knowledge that active growing kids will eat you out of house and home. The research suggests that, if you give them more of the good stuff, they’ll eat it, as long as there’s still – in their view – an adequate amount of the stuff they crave on the plate. And it makes sense that they’ll eat even more of the good stuff if you reduce the amount of not-so-good stuff on the plate.
But that’s just coercion. It may work of they kids are eating in the company of other kids who are being fed under the same regimen. There’s no temptation lurking, as there is in a home/family situation, on the plates of others around the table who are allowed to choose what and how much they eat.
I fear that the remarkable, almost miraculous findings of the highly controlled study won’t translate to the real world. Too bad!
~ Maggie J.