Researchers: Do this to get kids to eat more fruits and vegetables
Want your child to eat more fruits and vegetables? Spending more time at the dinner table could help, German researchers say.
For their study, 50 pairs of parents and a child (25 boys and 25 girls who had an average age of 8) were served a meal of cold cuts, sliced bread and cheese, along with bite-sized fruits and vegetables.
The children ate “significantly more” of their fruits and vegetables when they sat at the table for 10 minutes longer, or 30 minutes in total. On average, they ate about 3.5 ounces more.
“The duration of the meal is one of the central components of a family meal which parents can vary to improve the diet of their children,” said Ralph Hertwig, director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
The study was published online in JAMA Network Open.
Post a comment to this article
Safety+Health welcomes comments that promote respectful dialogue. Please stay on topic. Comments that contain personal attacks, profanity or abusive language – or those aggressively promoting products or services – will be removed. We reserve the right to determine which comments violate our comment policy. (Anonymous comments are welcome; merely skip the “name” field in the comment box. An email address is required but will not be included with your comment.)