Reducing the portion of pizza burgers and chicken nuggets on kids' lunch plates may be one way of getting them to eat their veggies.
Researchers speculate if you can alter entree size, you can affect consumption of fruits and vegetables.
They tracked eating patterns among 410 children in grades 1 to 5 at a local elementary school during the school year. The researchers filmed more than 5,000 student meals and evaluated the percentage of plate waste. The investigators found that, on average, children ate 67% of their entire lunch.
Students eat two-thirds and pitch the rest. However, if kids like their entree and eat more of it, they tended to eat less of their fruits and vegetables.
Researchers hypothesized that decreasing the size of the entree may be a way to subtly get kids to eat more fruits and vegetables. Overall in the US, fewer than 15% of schoolchildren meet the recommended daily allotment of fruit, and fewer than 20% meet the recommendations for vegetables.
More than 27 million students participate daily in the National School Lunch Program, which mandates the inclusion of fruits and vegetables. Reduction of entree size may free up money that school nutritionists can allocate toward fresh fruits and vegetables rather than canned.
That's important, because the kids like fresh fruits and vegetables, but that's more expensive.
Researchers also found that offering a choice between two fruits and two vegetables increased the number of students choosing to buy a school lunch by 17%.
American Academy of Pediatrics' Annual Meeting, San Francisco, October 22, 2001
Although this is not rocket science research sometimes we need to get hit upside the head with a bit of common sense.
Many parents are concerned that their children need to eat three meals a day and this is just not true unless they are seriously underweight. Since obesity is epidemic in children in this country this is not a problem for most kids.
I explain to parents of children that I see that the solution for a food that doesn't taste very good is about 24 hours. Once a child does not eat for that long their appetite will have a remarkable shift.
I have had some autistic children go for several days without eating prior to their appetite changing, but normally it only takes one or two days.
Obviously, if children are older than five years old, the ability to effectively implement this is somewhat limited, as kids will tend to get other foods from their friends at school.
However, the advice given above makes terrific sense, especially since the average child is already throwing one third of their school lunch out.