Getting Students to Eat Vegetables Is Surprisingly Simple
Photo:usdagov/Flickr/Creative Commons License
It's the puzzle that's confounded parents for years: How do you get kids to eat their vegetables?
In our neck of the woods, the L.A. Unified School District tried their best in 2011 by offering students a new menu full of wholesome food. Unfortunately, a subsequent study by UCLA showed that the effort was a grade A flop. So, what can we do? Apparently, the answer is simpler than we thought.
Dr. Traci Mann is a professor of psychology who studies health and eating at the University of Minnesota. Recently, her lab released a study that offers a creative, yet simple, solution: Offer vegetables before the students get to eat any other food. Turns out, this method works. I spoke to Dr. Mann about the study.
What are we doing wrong with some of our methods to get kids to eat vegetables?
Dr. Traci Mann: Efforts to get kids to eat vegetables by telling them how important it is and telling them about nutrition hasn't work that well. It worked a little, but not nearly enough. So we've been trying to find ways to get kids to eat more vegetables without doing that kind of thing. Kids don't want to do what a bunch of grown-ups tell them to do. So, this project we asked what's the main thing standing in the way of a kid eating vegetables in the school lunch cafeteria? They are sitting on the plate next to the stuff that you like better. Vegetables lose to other foods. The main competition a vegetable could win would be a contest between a vegetable and nothing. This was the backbone of this project. Serve kids their vegetables first in isolation, not with other foods, when they're at their most hungry.
How did you perform this?
Dr. Mann: It was the easiest thing in the world to do. We did it two different ways. One way was in school where the kids go to their lunch table before getting their food. They sit at their tables and the tables are called up one by one. While the kids were sitting at their lunch table, we just put some baby carrots on the table at each place. We didn't say a word. By doing that, it went from 10% of kids eating carrots, to 54% of kids eating carrots, and the amount of carrots in grams quadrupled. It's still not enough, because we have a long way to go, but it definitely had a huge effect.
Then we went back and tried it again with the regular cafeteria setup, where kids go from their classroom and into the lunch line. In this case, the kids have to swipe their meal card before going in. That's a bottle neck, you're in a long line to do that. So, we put these little cups of vegetables on this tray and we put it at the far end of the hallway, so that kids would have to walk past it in line. Once they had it, they would have a little bit of time to eat it before they swiped their card.
Is it a novelty thing that could wear off?
Dr. Mann: We did it repeatedly to see if it would wear off, and it didn't at all. They still ate way more vegetables when they had them first. Eating a vegetable first, or alone, is literally the easiest thing you can do and it has a huge effect. It sounds obvious, but it's not so obvious that everyone's doing it. Maybe they'll read the paper and do it, but it's not happening that way.
Are there any reasons that schools couldn't implement this?
Dr. Mann: I feel like it would be easy. My colleagues are more familiar with how schools do things, but all of the schools we visited had the vegetables portioned out, so when the kids went into the cafeteria they had a cup full. So, bring them to wherever the kids have their bottleneck. If the cafeteria is serving from a big bowl and spooning, they're going to have to get containers and go through the extra trouble to spoon it out. So for certain kinds of schools, it's trivially easy. For other kinds of schools, they'll have to make it possible.
What other methods have proven effective?
Dr. Mann: A different thing we tried is putting a picture of carrots in one section of the tray and broccoli in another on days they were being served. That's also super easy to do and had a big effect. We don't really know why that works, but we have ideas. It's sort of providing a norm to eating. Students don't want to do what you tell them. They do want to do what their friends are doing. This is not helpful when it comes to eating vegetables because their friends are not eating vegetables. But by putting the pictures on the trays, we felt we were giving kids the impression that this is what people do.
