Posted on 02/05/2021
2 min read
The more children are involved in growing vegetables and preparing meals, the more likely they are to finish their plate of broccoli. Logic ? School gardens, which are starting to proliferate around the world, could be the key to better food education, reveals a new scientific study.
Spend hours at the table waiting for our dear toddlers to finally deign to put this piece of parsnip in their mouths. An ordeal that parents – or anyone who has ever eaten with a child – know perfectly well. How to solve this problem ? A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin has looked into the issue, and sees school gardens as an ideal solution.
Scientists worked with sixteen elementary schools in Texas. Vegetable gardens were installed in schools and nutrition and cooking lessons were offered to students and their parents. Note that schools have been targeted so that the study focuses specifically on low-income groups, most affected by childhood obesity. For an academic year, researchers studied changes in student eating behavior, and observed changes in weight, body mass index, and blood pressure.
Published in the journal International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, their work reveals that the children who took care of the vegetable garden and participated in the nutrition and cooking classes ate more vegetables than before the start of the program. And even if it’s just an extra half a serving, it can play a huge role in how they think about eating over time, the researchers say.
Learn more about vegetables to adopt them
“Many families in these schools are food insecure. They live in food deserts and face a higher risk of childhood obesity and associated health problems. Teaching children where their food comes from, how to grow it, and how to prepare it is key to changing eating behaviors in the long run.“says Jaimie Davis, professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
In contrast, there was no significant change in weight, body mass index, or blood pressure during the nine months of the study, for the 3,000 students involved. This does not mean that increased consumption of vegetables has no influence on the health of these children, as the lead author of the study reveals. “Behavior changes can be difficult to achieve, especially in the long term. Changes in health parameters such as blood pressure may take longer to appear. Getting kids to eat more vegetables can potentially set them up for long-term success“.
Parents, for their part, seem to have become aware of changes in their child’s behavior, which have discovered vegetables they would never have thought of before. “The parents I speak with ask me, ‘How did you feed my child cabbage?’ But when they grow cabbage from seed and learn how to prepare it in olive oil and cook it into cabbage crisps, they love it“, concludes Jaimie Davis.
Slide: February: fruits, vegetables and seasonal fish