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25 September 2012

How Tablemates Can Serve As Role Models in Eating Vegetables

Keywords: intervention, parents, preschoolers, vegetables, North America, consumer behavior, eating behavior, experiment, health, kids, peers, persuasion, resistance,

How can I stimulate my child to eat vegetables? It’s a question many parents worry about. Especially when children are at school, parents feel they have no or little control about their child’s nutrition. According to a study in the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, however, (pre)schools can actually be a pretty good environment to change children’s vegetable intake. The study shows that ‘tablemates’ at lunch who eat a relatively great amount of vegetables influence other children to eat more vegetables as well.

Take aways

  • Children who have lunch next to classmates who eat a relatively large amount of vegetables, improve their own vegetable consumption. Excellent vegetable eaters should therefore be seated strategically during lunch next to children who have difficulties with eating vegetables.
  • Parents and caregivers should be stimulated not to give up so easily when their child rejected certain vegetables a few times. This rejection may be due to different factors, like state of hunger or mood. It’s important that parents pay attention to those factors and adapt to them.

Study information

  • The question?

    How can children be stimulated to eat vegetables?

  • Who?

    96 3-to 6-year-olds (85% is 4 or 5 years old; 56% boys and 44% girls; 69% of the children are white, 8% Asian, 5% African-American, 6% Hispanic and 12% have other backgrounds; 93% of the children had at least one parent with a bachelor’s degree and 75% had at least one parent with a graduate or professional degree).

  • Where?

    United States (a small northeastern city)

  • How?

    Two private preschools were selected for a 12-week intervention program to stimulate children to eat more vegetables. During the first 6 weeks, preschool A (intervention school) was asked to serve 3 different vegetables: cauliflower, snow peas and green peppers. These vegetables were chosen, because they were the least well-known and well-liked vegetables. Every day, one of those vegetables was served. All children were served the same vegetable bags for lunch and were assigned to a certain lunch table. Children were also asked to put leftovers back into the bag. In that way teachers were able to weight the amount of vegetables they ate per day. Preschool B (non-intervention school) continued daily lunch routines. 

Facts and findings

  • Children who have lunch next to classmates who eat a relatively large amount of vegetables, eat more vegetables. 
  • The eating of one gram of vegetables by excellent eaters stimulates difficult eaters to increase their vegetable intake by one fifth of a gram. 
  • The six-week intervention did not stimulate children of the intervention school (preschool A) to eat more vegetables. The average vegetable consumption before the intervention was 10,7 gram, afterwards it declined to 8,5 gram. In contrast, during those six weeks the vegetable consumption of the children of the non-intervention school (preschool B) did improve from 6,2 gram to 7,5 gram.
  • According to the researchers, an explanation for this finding could be that the duration of the intervention was too short. The children of the intervention school ate each vegetable (cauliflower, snow peas and green peppers) ten times in a six week period. It could be that more tastings of the same vegetable were necessary to really improve the liking of this vegetable. 
  • The vegetable intake per child differed from day to day. This means that vegetables that were not picked by children on the one day, may well be eaten on another day. It’s possible that there is a variability in consumption because of other factors, like their state of hunger or mood.
  • Half of the children were willing to try each vegetable at least three times. 
  • Children who were willing to eat one type of vegetable, were also willing to try the other vegetables.