How do we get our kids to eat healthy? It is a growing question as we begin to know more and more the benefits of eating healthy as a preventative way to improve our quality of life and avoid chronic disease in the future. Many funding projects aim to increase access to healthy options for kids in schools. Often times vending machines are stocked with healthier options and “junk foods” are eliminated. We can also see and attempt to provide and offer only healthy options in cafeterias, starting breakfast programs, and fruit and vegetables added to meals as “snacks” as oppose to chips or “fruit snacks.” But how effective are these interventions? Many times much of these healthy fruits and vegetable are found in garbage cans and never make it off the tray.
A study looking at this problem decided there must be a way to get kids to eat these healthy fruits and vegetables without them being wasted. Maybe children just needed to be hungry enough. A group in Utah decided they would try to change recess from after lunch, which is commonly part of the schedule, and change it to before lunch. They suspected that often times kids were in a rush to get to “recess time” and weren’t so hungry that they felt the need to eat the healthy snacks. This left many of these to go into the trash when recess was after lunch and after they finished eating. They monitored fruits and vegetable snacks that made it to the garbage and found that after they changed recess to before lunch kids were possibly more hungry or less likely to be rushed; hence less fruits and vegetables being thrown away. In fact 54% more fruits and vegetables were eaten when recess came before lunch instead of after.
Not only does this matter for future health, but eating a balanced diet day to day helps kids to focus and give them energy to improve their performance at school. Making the switch to recess before lunch could be the answer to improving the quality of the meals at school and just might make kids eat their veggies!
Holding Recess before Lunch Increases Fruit and Veggie Consumption and Decreases Waste Price, Joseph and David Just (2014). Lunch, Recess and Nutrition: Responding to Time Incentives in the Cafeteria. Preventive Medicine. doi:10.1016/j.ypmed.2014.11.016