If kids aren’t eating vegetables, the answer is simple: Create better marketing.
A Pediatrics study published Tuesday found that banners and TV segments featuring vegetable characters nearly tripled the likelihood that elementary school students would opt for a veggie at lunch.
The research, spanning 10 elementary schools in a large northeastern city, examined marketing techniques that have been ignored by past studies, which have instead focused largely on peer pressure’s effect on vegetable consumption, plus serving bowl appearance.
“With childhood nutrition as the ultimate goal, the synergistic combination of marketing strategies and healthy choices has great potential for improving what children take and eat, both in and out of school,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Over the course of six weeks, the researchers tested three marketing approaches. Some students were exposed to vinyl banners in the cafeteria that showed animated veggie characters with super powers — think Super Sprowtz — while others watched short TV segments with veggie characters delivering healthy messages. A third group was exposed to both the banner and the TV segments; a final control group had no marketing interventions.
Among the students who were only exposed to the banner, the number who added vegetables to their meal jumped 90.5 percent. (Twelve percent of the kids took veggies before the banners were introduced; 24 percent did after.) Combing the banners and TV segments led to a 239.2 percent increase in taking veggies from the cafeteria offerings, but the TV segment by itself did not garner a radical change.
The findings suggest that conventional marketing techniques — which we already know are persuasive — can be leveraged in ways that encourage kids to make positive, healthy changes.
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How to Get Kids to Eat More Veggies originally appeared on usnews.com
