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Little Changes = Big Results
There are so many excuses for eating junk food. A healthy meal takes more time to prepare and eat than something from a box or a fast-food restaurant. Fruit can be hard to bite into, and get stuck in your braces. And faced with a choice between French fries or asparagus, how many people would really choose asparagus?
A recent study shows that junk-food habits start when kids are younger than 2 – in fact, by the time of their first birthdays, toddlers are fed diets filled with chips, cookies, and other unhealthy snacks. And once kids develop a taste for all this added sugar and salt, it’s hard to break the habit. But there are simple, creative ways to change those patterns.
At Frederick Douglass Elementary school in Leesburg, Virginia, educators noticed that kids weren’t eating their school breakfasts. Why? It was making them late to class. So the school let them bring their meals to class, and all of a sudden, the number of students eating school breakfast more than doubled.
Apples served to kids as part of the National School Lunch Program often ended up being thrown in the garbage. But a pilot study conducted at eight schools found that kids were 60% more likely to eat the apples if they were served sliced. It seems that cutting up fruits made it much more appealing for kids to take the first bite.
Now that inspires me to make myself a nice bowl of fruit salad!