Teaching children to eat more vegies - voluntarily

Parents: your prayers have been answered. Stanford researchers have come up with a new way to get picky children to eat more vegetables - voluntarily. Sound too good to be true?

The key, the researchers say, is to teach children the importance of healthy foods and why their bodies need a variety of foods. Research by psychologists Sarah Gripshover and Ellen Markman shows that young children are capable of understanding a conceptual approach to nutrition.

While people usually assume that complex, abstract concepts will be too confusing for young children, kids’ natural curiosity about how things work can be harnessed to teach them good food habits, the researchers say.

Gripshover and Markman created five storybooks emphasising key food and nutrition concepts: the importance of variety, how digestion works, the different food groups, characteristics of nutrients and how nutrients help the body function.

Two classrooms of four- and five-year-old children had the books read to them during snack time for three months, while another two classrooms had snack time as usual. The children were then asked questions about food, nutrition and bodily functions to assess their grasp of the concepts outlined in books.

Children in the classrooms with the nutrition books more than doubled their voluntary intake of vegetables during snack time, the researchers found. The control group’s vegetable intake stayed approximately the same. The children who heard the books read also had a better understanding and knowledge of digestion and the role nutrients play in the body.

The researchers also compared their conceptual framework to a teaching strategy based on US Department of Agriculture materials that emphasise the enjoyment of healthy eating and encourage children to try new foods. While both methods increased vegetable intake, the Stanford strategy boosted vegetable intake overall.

“What sets our materials apart from other approaches is the care we took to explain to children why their body needs different kinds of healthy food. We did not train children to eat more vegetables specifically,” the researchers said.

“There is no magic bullet to encourage healthy eating in young children. We view our approach as unique but possibly complementary to other strategies. In the future, our concept-based educational materials could be combined with behaviourally focused nutrition interventions with the hope of boosting healthy eating more than either technique alone.”

The findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.