Impact of teacher encouragement on children’s consumption and non-eating behaviour in a Wisconsin elementary school vegetable snack programme

Abstract

Objective: Schools participating in the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Programme (FFVP) serve more fruit than vegetables and tend not to implement activities designed to increase consumption. This research examines the impact of teacher encouragement on consumption of raw vegetables served through a non-FFVP elementary school snack programme. Method: Twelve teachers and 217 children in Grades K–3 were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. One condition served as the control group (no encouragement), while the other two conditions represented intervention groups (moderate and high encouragement). Three vegetables were served eight times each with teachers in both intervention conditions providing encouragement for the first six servings of each vegetable. All encouragement was discontinued during the final two servings of each vegetable. Average consumption and non-eating behaviour were analysed using differences in means, ordinary least squares and logistic regression analysis. Results: Moderate and high teacher encouragement significantly increased children’s consumption of vegetables compared to the control group. Both encouragement conditions also significantly reduced the likelihood of non-eating behaviour. The positive encouragement impacts were found to persist in the short term even when teacher encouragement had ceased, especially for the high encouragement condition. Conclusion: This study provides evidence that relatively low-cost teacher encouragement can decrease non-eating behaviour and increase children’s consumption of vegetable snacks served in elementary schools. This suggests that schools participating in the FFVP could see benefits from serving more vegetables and implementing encouragement activities. Moreover, these results could be informative to non-FFVP schools in implementing their own vegetable snack programme.