Many parents of young children can probably relate to this: pureeing pasta sauce so that no vegetables are visible, or feeding your child fruit in the form of a smoothie.
Fruit and vegetables are important, but it can sometimes be difficult to get children to eat enough of them. This is not only a challenge for parents, but also for other caregivers such as grandparents or childcare workers. Many children in the Netherlands attend daycare one or more days a week. A recent Dutch study looked at different strategies that daycare teachers can use to get children to eat more fruit and vegetables.
CORE
Four different strategies were tested: gardening with the children, cooking with the children, offering unfamiliar types of fruit and vegetables, and learning about fruit and vegetables in a playful way, for example, with books or songs.
The childcare workers generally found the strategies easy to implement and indicated that they intended to continue using them. Only cooking with the children was considered less practical.
The childcare workers reported that during and after the intervention, children were more willing to try new types of fruit and vegetables and seemed to enjoy eating vegetables more.
RESEARCH METHOD
WHAT?
This study investigated how childcare workers experience different strategies that can be used to encourage children to eat more fruit and vegetables. It also examined whether children actually ate more fruit and vegetables as a result of the interventions.
WHO?
Thirteen childcare centers for children aged 0-4 years, spread throughout the Netherlands, participated in the study. The childcare workers who participated in the study were all female and had an average age of 35.
Before the intervention, 98 teachers completed the questionnaires, and 49 teachers participated in the questionnaires administered after the intervention. The study is therefore limited to self-reporting by the teachers. No objective measurements were taken; for example, the researchers did not observe how much fruit and vegetables the children actually ate.
HOW?
Childcare centers were allowed to choose which strategy they wanted to implement over the next 10-12 weeks. The researchers sent the childcare centers a package containing the necessary items for their strategy, such as child-safe knives for cooking and seeds for gardening. Both before the intervention was introduced and after it had ended, the teachers completed questionnaires. These questionnaires first asked about their expectations of the intervention and how much fruit and vegetables the children at the daycare center already ate. After the intervention, they were asked how effective they thought the intervention had been, how often they had applied the strategy, and whether they intended to continue using the strategy in the future. In addition, the same questions were asked again about the children’s fruit and vegetable consumption.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
Almost half of the teachers indicated that they had applied the strategy on a daily basis. The interventions were generally assessed as appropriate for daily practice and easy to apply. Only cooking with the children was perceived as more difficult, and most teachers indicated that they would not continue with this strategy in the future. The teachers who had gardened with the children were most likely to indicate that they would continue to use this strategy in the future.
The teachers felt that after the intervention period, the children enjoyed eating vegetables more. They also said that the children were more willing to try new, unfamiliar types of fruit and vegetables. Although the strategies did not directly lead to an increase in total fruit and vegetable intake, the researchers believe that the strategies can still be valuable. Enjoying food and being open to new dishes is an important first step in encouraging fruit and vegetable consumption, so that children may actually eat more fruit and vegetables when they are older.
According to the authors, this study shows that childcare facilities can encourage children to eat more fruit and vegetables in a relatively simple and inexpensive way. It is therefore likely to be beneficial to garden or cook with young children, to teach them about fruit and vegetables in a playful way, and to offer them unfamiliar types of fruit and vegetables.
DETAILS
Zeinstra, G. G., Hoefnagels, F. A., Meijboom, S., & Battjes-Fries, M. C. (2023). Implementation of four strategies in Dutch day-care centers to stimulate young children’s fruit and vegetable consumption. Appetite, 181, 106378. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2022.106378
This sci-fly was written by Emma Koenders (Master’s student in Behavioral Sciences, Radboud University) for RAD-blog, the blog about smoking, alcohol, drugs, and diet.