A Little Competition Helps Kids Make Healthy Dietary Choices

Childhood obesity still remains increasingly common throughout the United States. Fortunately, there is now a subtle way to encourage healthy eating. Simply by providing a little competition, parents can promote healthy dietary habits in their children.

"Our study looked at ways in which we can better target interventions that change young people's eating habits in favor of them choosing and eating more fruit and vegetables," said Dr. Jonathan James from the Department of Economics, in a news release. "Through our research we found that introducing an element of competition at lunchtime could have larger effects on children's eating habits than using an incentive scheme that was based only on their own choices. By using a different approach, we found that the proportion of children trying fruit and vegetables could be increased by up to a third."

For the study, researchers recruited over 600 students in years two and five from 31 schools. The students were randomly assigned into three different types of groups: individual based incentive programs, competition based incentive programs and a control group.

In the control group, researchers found that even boys responded well to both forms of incentives, while girls responded significantly better to the competition based incentive programs. On the other hand, the team found that girls, who ate better than boys in general, typically consumed more fruits and vegetables. Furthermore, researchers said they believed that using certain incentives helped children with healthier eating habits.

"Using incentives, particularly with children, is often controversial. Yet many parents use incentives to encourage positive behavior from their children," said Professor Michèle Belot, of the University of Edinburgh, via Medical Xpress. "Our research shows that certain incentives do work, and in particular work for groups of children that typically respond little or not at all to other health-promoting interventions, such as boys and children from poorer backgrounds."

More information regarding the information can be found via the paper "Incentives and Children's Dietary Choices: A Field experiment in Primary Schools."