Effect of education on food behaviour: A survey on 6-9 years old Italian children

Considering that child obesity and its health impacts track into adulthood, preventing obesity from early age has become a major public health priority in the developed world. Since there is now good evidence that increasing fruit and vegetable intake has associated concrete health benefits and can protect against excess weight gain, the present research project proposes a school-based intervention designed to encourage children to taste fruit and vegetables and to increase their consumption. The program, based on three core principles on the determinants of children’s food behavior (i.e. role-modeling, rewards and repeated tasting), consists of a period of about 2 weeks during which children watch brief cartoon episodes starring superheroes and read letters addressed to them and sent by those heroes who encourage them to taste fruit and vegetables and to conduct healthy lifestyles. The effectiveness of the educational program has been evaluated measuring children’s food preference, their neophobic behavior and consumption of fruit and vegetables before, during and after the intervention in experimental and control groups of children aged between 6 and 10 years. Preliminary results showed that the intervention was effective in reducing food neophobia, especially for younger children. Fruit was significantly more liked than vegetable. The educational program produced a significant liking increase especially for vegetable. Intervention was more effective in increasing liking for unfamiliar food.