Could Lunch After Recess Help Kids Eat More Fruits And Veggies?

New findings published in the journal Preventive Medicine illustrate how school kids can incorporate more fruits and vegetables into their diet. All it may take is having lunch after recess instead of before.

"Recess is a pretty big deal for most kids. If you have kids choose between playing and eating their veggies, the time spent playing is going to win most of the time," said Joe Price, an economics professor at Brigham Young University, in a news release. "You just don't want to set the opportunity cost of good behaviors too high."

For their research, the study authors looked at seven schools in a Utah school district (grades 1-6), where half of the children in the sample qualified for free or reduced price school lunch.

During the study period, three of the schools switched their recess to before lunch while four schools continued the same sequence. For four days in the spring and nine in the fall, researchers then measured fruit and vegetable waste by standing next to trash cans and recording the number of servings that each student consumed or threw away, as well as if each student ate at least one serving of fruits or vegetables.

"This put us in a unique position to evaluate the impact of a changing recess before lunch since we were already collecting data at the schools making the change as well as some very similar schools nearby," said BYU's Joseph Price. Price and colleague David Just, a behavioral economist at Cornell, were concerned that many students from low-income families who weren't eating fruits and vegetables at home might be repeating the pattern with lunch at school, via USA Today. "This was a natural fit with our prior work looking at what motivates kids to eat more nutritious foods."

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