Photo: Micheal Sears/MCT/Landov
Schools are offering more and more healthy foods for lunch. And schools that participate in the National School Lunch program require students to choose a fruit and a vegetable side. Yet plate waste is a big problem in schools; as The Salt has reported, kids throw away anywhere from 24 to 35 percent of what’s on their trays.
In many schools, kids tend to eat the entrée, like pizza, first, and leave the fruits and vegetables for last. If they aren’t hungry after the entrée, they won’t eat the healthy foods. But “they definitely don’t leave the dessert on the tray,” says Joe Price, a professor of economics at Brigham Young University. Price, along with David Just, a researcher at the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs, wanted to see if perhaps stoking kids hunger by letting them go to recess before lunch might change the equation.A study they’ve just published in Preventative Medicine suggests it does. They found that students who have recess before lunch tend to eat more servings of fruits and vegetables than kids who eat lunch first.
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NPR
Poncie Rutsch
January 20, 2015 6:18 PM ET
