Interventions to improve child nutrition at school have included everything from reducing cookie size, adding fruit to classroom cupcake celebrations, and giving vegetables attractive names, to more comprehensive strategies such as “veggiecation” curricula, and transforming school cafeterias.
Tricks to Get Kids to Eat Healthier at School
Doctor's Note
What’s so bad about trans fats? See Trans Fat in Meat & Dairy; Trans Fat, Saturated Fat, & Cholesterol: Tolerable Upper Intake of Zero; and Breast Cancer Survival & Trans Fat.
Whenever I find myself frustrated by half measures, I am forced to remind myself just how SAD the Standard American Diet is. See Nation’s Diet in Crisis for a reality check. One of the problems is that parents may not even realize there is a problem (see Mothers Overestimate Dietary Quality).
Feel free to check out the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food website at http://www.healthyschoolfood.org/.
This is the first video of my three-part series on practical tips for dietary improvement. In my next two videos, I cover Tricks to Get Kids to Eat Healthier at Home and Tricks to Get Adults to Eat Healthier.
For more context, check out my associated blog posts: How to Get Kids to Eat their Vegetables, How to Get our Kids to Eat their Vegetables, and How to Get Parents to Eat their Vegetables.
If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here.
17 responses to “Tricks to Get Kids to Eat Healthier at School”
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When I was a child, we all loved to eat spinach because we saw Popeye eat it during Saturday morning cartoons. We wanted to be strong like Popeye
Thanks for another practical video. The point is well taken and entirely appropriate. There is no nutritional value to food which is not eaten. Getting kids to eat healthy can be especially problematic. Any strategy which makes it easier to overcome the apparent barriers , on both an individual and social level is much appreciated.
Put Joan Cusack on it. The little ankle bitters will eat right, like it AND clean up their rooms!
I like the idea with attractive names – what about non-attractive names:
Stroke-beef
Cancer-milk
Inflammation-egg
Mercury-fish
Diabetes-cheese
Coronary occlusion-poultry
Cavity-candy
:-)
Plantstrongdoc, Thanks for the laugh! Great idea! Kind of along the lines of the “horrors of smoking” ads seen in recent years.
Plantstrongdoc: Too funny!
My contributions include:
* poop-crusted legs (for chicken)
* puss milk (or puss cheese – take your pick)
* die-early eggs
* constipation steak
I don’t know if it would make any difference given what many kids and their parents seem happy to eat, but it would be worth a shot. :-)
Great vid! This is really encouraging, but the news media are still reporting the backlash. http://news.msn.com/us/some-school-districts-dropping-healthier-lunch-programs. Same story as the last year’s brouhaha from Kansas as the usual fate of such efforts. See http://www.khi.org/news/2012/oct/01/some-say-new-meal-guidelines-should-be-scrapped/. Sigh.
Dr.Greger, why are you recommending that site when it recommends that 25% of diet is animal food?
That’s a good point worth reflecting on. Regardless, if the goal is healthy food, nutritionally educated people need to get involved and raise the bar so the food is actually healthy (animal-free, as you imply).
You mean Coalition for Healthy School Food? No, I think you misunderstood their pie chart—it’s descriptive, NOT prescriptive. They’re saying the current consumption of animal food is the problem. All their recipes and recommendations promote plant-based food.
This is another fascinating video but what is your objection to using adverbs? Given the education context, it would have been appropriate to get the grammar right.
Prescriptive grammar is arbitrary. Dr. Gregor is trying to educate people, so he writes the way they talk. I don’t think it takes away from his professionalism. He seems to be trying to make these videos accessible to the average person. Be honest, would you really say “more healthily” if you were talking to someone?
This isn’t an English exam. Perfect grammar isn’t everyone’s top priority. The good and important thing is that health information is being shared, and people are being greatly helped by it. Peace
It’s easier to get kids to eat fruit because kids have a sweet tooth. They don’t really crave candy, like lifesavers, they crave tart berries, sweet strawberries, tasty bananas, wonderful watermelon. They are drawn to candy because conventional, pesticide-grown fruit is bland. Put organic ripe fruit on the table and kids will drop the artificial candy and devour nature’s candy. Remember that Lifesavers got its flavors from nature.
As the study suggests, adding cool names to platters of ripe, organic fruit will increase eating even more.
doing the cute names,making eating the food a game is just what the food companies do with their packaging & commercials
Or the reason why MC Donald calls the Happy Meal his product, which real name should be the Unhealty Meal, to be honest.