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Increasing fruit and vegetable
consumption in a class of pre-school nursery children Janette Woolner, Pauline J. Horne and C. Fergus Lowe University Of Wales, Wales A class of thirty-six nursery school children aged between 2 and 5 years participated in a study designed to increase their consumption of fruit and vegetables. A peer modelling video-plus-rewards intervention was employed in a multiple baseline procedure to target consumption of firstly fruit and then vegetables. Throughout the study, the children were presented with one of four food sets twice daily: (i) once as a mid-morning snack (intervention setting and (ii) once as an addition to the midday meal (generalisation setting). Each food set differed from the other 3 and consisted of two fruits and two vegetables all of which were poorly consumed by the children in Pre-Baseline. During a 16-day Baseline a different food set was presented each day, in a 4-day repeating cycle. In the first Intervention phase, two of the foods were presented on a 2-day cycle and each child's consumption of the fruit components was reinforced. In Baseline 2, the 4-day food set cycle was reinstated. During the second intervention, each child's snack time consumption of the vegetable components of the 2 cycled food sets was reinforced. In the final Baseline, and 9-month Follow-Up phase conducted under baseline conditions, the children showed substantial increases in their snack-time consumption of fruit and vegetables. These increases generalised to the lunch-time setting and to the fruit and vegetable components of the non-targetted food sets. When given the opportunity to ask for and consume more fruit and vegetables, consumption increased yet further to 100+66% and 100+52% respectively of baseline levels. Keywords: children, fruit, vegetables, consumption, peer-modelling, rewards |
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