The rather surprising study found that simply sticking a smiley face on packaging or offering a small price caused children to dramatically increase their healthy eating habits.
So how do you get kids to eat their veggies? Maybe the solution is to put smiley faces on the packaging.
New research suggests that something as simple as a smiley or small prizes for buying a healthy item can prompt kids to ask for such foods and be happy to eat them, according to a Times of India report.
Robert Siegel of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, who authored the study, said that this is a promising and low-cost way of getting children to eat better foods.
It might be particularly useful for schools who want to improve the nutrition of their students, he added.
Researchers examining students in kindergarten through the sixth grade at an inner-city school in Cincinnati, and placed green smiley face emoticons on the most nutritious foods in the first phase of the study, focusing on fruits, vegetables, fat-free milk, and a whole-grain entree.
Three months after that, they created the “Power Plate” that had four healthy foods, and those who chose that could get a small prize like a sticker or a temporary tattoo.
The results were extraordinary: students chose plain milk 48 percent of the time, a massive increase from the 7.4 percent who were choosing that item before. Chocolate milk purchases declined from 86.5 percent to 44.6 percent.
Fruit selections increased by 20 percent per student each day, vegetable selections skyrocketed 62 percent per student.
But that pales in comparison to the biggest increase: the Power Plate, which jumped 335 percent among students.
The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in San Diego.
