Increasing Children’s Fruit and Vegetable Consumption

How can we get children to eat fruit and vegetables? If you are a parent, you know that this is not an easy question. If you are a health professional concerned about childhood obesity and health, you may wonder how you can encourage parents to buy fruits and vegetables and make them available so children will eat more of them.

Dr. Tom Baranowski and his colleagues at the Children’s Nutrition Research Center have shown that children will eat more fruits and vegetables if parents make them available. Now they are trying to understand why adult food shoppers do not buy more fruit and vegetables and how buying patterns could be influenced. They used outcome expectancies [the good or not so good things that one believes will happen as a result of a behavior], item response theory and other statistical procedures to discover information about fruit and vegetable purchasing behaviors. (More information about the research and scientific methods used is available in the March 2007 issue of Public Health Nutrition.) Refer to www.nutritionsociety.org for additional information about this article.

Parents responded to a number of statements including: I like to eat fruits/vegetables because

• they are good for your health.
• I grew up eating them.
• they are easy to prepare.
• they are inexpensive.

Although responses differed, when the data were analyzed it was clear that parents were convinced that eating fruit and vegetables was good for health. This suggests that the nutritional quality of fruit and vegetables is well known. Providing more information about health benefits of fruits and vegetables most likely would not lead to increased consumption. Many consumers did not agree with thestatement that fruits and vegetables were inexpensive. This suggests that educational efforts should highlight the nutrient content of fruit and vegetables compared to cost. Analysis of the taste preferences showed that adults liked fruit better than vegetables and preferred fresh vegetables over cooked vegetables. This may suggest that tasty, simple, quick and easy-to-prepare recipes should be developed for vegetables and introduced to food shoppers.

Dr. Baranowski concluded, “Behaviors such as purchasing fruit and vegetables are usually done for a reason. If we can understand the reasons or “motivating factors”, we should have a better chance to influence purchasing behavior, leading to more successful interventions to increase fruit and vegetable consumption for our children.”