By Carol Church, Writer, Family Album
Reviewed by Jennifer Walsh, Department of Family, Youth, and Community Sciences, University of Florida
If you’ve ever gone to the grocery store right before dinner and ended up buying a tasty-looking snack that wasn’t on your list, then you know how hunger can affect food purchases. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that hungry kids in the cafeteria line at school often give in to similar temptations. In an era of increasing concern about childhood nutrition and obesity, how can we help students make better choices?
In a simple but compelling experiment, researchers randomly assigned elementary school students to either pre-order their school lunches or to make their selections as they entered the lunch line. Researchers classified the entrees as healthy or less healthy, based on their nutrient content.
Both groups of students chose the unhealthy entree more often than the healthy one. However, students were twice as likely to choose the healthy option when they pre-ordered.
The researchers speculate that it may be fairly easy to select the healthier choice when pre-ordering, when students aren’t as influenced by hunger and can make less impulsive and wiser food choices. But when hungry students get in line and see and smell a less healthy but tempting-looking entree, they tend to give in to their impulses.
Importantly, preordering didn’t seem to affect how much food the students actually ate. And when students preordered, they were also more likely to choose more nutritious side items. Overall, this study suggests a simple, inexpensive method that schools can use to decrease impulse food purchases and increase the nutritional quality of school lunches.
(Image credit: School lunch staff and students enjoy the new school lunch menu created to meet the new standards at the Yorkshire Elementary School in Manassas, VA on Friday, Sept. 7, 2012. USDA photo by Lance Cheung at US Department of Agriculture by US Department of Agriculture. CC license.)
References:
Hanks, A. S., Just, D. R., & Wansink, D. R. (2013). Preordering school lunch encourages better food choices by children. JAMA Pediatrics. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2013.82
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