Kids Eat More Fresh Fruits & Veggies If Given a Chance, Study Finds
Parents, don't despair. You can get your children to eat colorful, nutritious fruits and veggies. My blog researcher Jennifer Moore, brings you some good news.
As the mother of a picky eating 5-year-old, I know it isn't easy to get your kids to eat healthy foods. But news of a recent study from the University of California Los Angeles gives me hope that it can be done.
As you can learn in the December edition of the journal Public Health Nutrition, three Los Angeles elementary schools participated in a nutrition program that put salad bars in to school cafeterias and arranged for children to take field trips to a farmer's market or farm. The L.A. project also offered the youngsters ideas on how to pick healthy foods and gave them a chance to be involved in a fun art project.
Then, the UCLA research team -- headed up by Wendy Slusser, M.D. assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of California at Los Angeles and assistant professor of pediatrics at Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA -- gave a 24-hour food recall questionnaire to 337 kids from 2nd through 5th grades.
What they found was very encouraging:
Low-income youngsters ate fruits and vegetables more than 4 times a day after the salad bar program, while they ate them less than 3 times a day prior to the program. (The study doesn't address whether these kids also ate less sugar and other refined carbs (or what Connie calls "culprit carbs"), but let's cross our fingers that this is the case.)
This promising study reveals that there's really no excuse for schools all over the U.S. not to provide kids healthier food choices, in my opinion.Thanks to Medical News Today for the tip on this story.
Jennifer Moore for SUGAR SHOCK! Blog
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