Spending Extra 10 Minutes at the Table can Make Kids Eat More Fruits and Veggies

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Extending family mealtime for just 10 minutes can make kids eat more fruits and vegetables, suggests a new study.

On average, they ate about 100 grams more fruits and vegetables. This represents about one of the five recommended daily portions of fruits and vegetables and is as much as a small apple or a small bell pepper.

‘Longer family meals can make kids eat more fruits and vegetables.’

The results of the study have been published in the US journal JAMA Network Open.

Fill Your Plate with Fruits And Veggies

"This outcome has practical importance for public health because one additional daily portion of fruit and vegetables reduces the risk of cardiometabolic disease by 6 to 7 percent," explains Jutta Mata, professor of health psychology at the University of Mannheim. "For such an effect, a sufficient quantity of fruits and vegetables must be available on the table - bite-sized pieces are best", the health psychologist adds.

How to Get Your Children to Eat More Fruits and Veggies?

50 pairs of parents and 50 children participated in the study. The average age of children in the study was 8 years and the average age of parents was 43 years. An equal number of boys and girls participated. The participants were served a typical German dinner with sliced bread, cold cuts, and cheese, as well as fruits and vegetables cut into bite-sized pieces.

How Long Should Your Child Sit at the Table to Eat?

"The duration of the meal is one of the central components of a family meal which parents can vary to improve the diet of their children. We had already found hints of this relation in a meta-analysis on studies looking at the qualitative components of healthy family meals. In this new experimental study, we were able to prove a formerly only correlative relationship," says Ralph Hertwig, Director at the Center for Adaptive Rationality of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

The study also shows that longer family meals did not lead to the children eating more bread or cold cuts; they also did not eat more dessert. Researchers assume that the bite-sized pieces of fruits and vegetables were easier to eat and thus more enticing.

Source: Eurekalert