Eat Your Vegetables!

This may be a candidate for an IgNobel Prize, published as a research letter in JAMA: how to get schoolchildren to eat their vegetables!

Control group: normal lunch trays.  Intervention group: lunch trays with compartments specifically labeled with photographs of green beans and carrots.  Results: success!  Green bean choice went from 6.3% of children to 14.8% of children, and carrot choice went from 11.6% to 36.8%.  Amount of green bean and carrot consumption was stable on an individual basis, resulting in an overal net consumption of both green beans and carrots by their cohort.

Of course, this was only a single day intervention – my guess is the effect would fatigue – but, at least, for one day, children ate more vegetables.

This has far-reaching implications for Emergency Medicine.

“Photographs in Lunch Tray Compartments and Vegetable Consumption Among Children in Elementary School Cafeterias”
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/early/2012/01/31/jama.2012.170.full