Bangor Food and Activity Research Unit

Overview

Any attempts to produce long-term improvements in the nation's diet should start with children.

Although it is recognised that eating fruit and vegetables is vital for health and well-being, we in the UK do not eat enough of these foods; children, in particular, especially the poorest, avoid them. The UK has one of the lowest fruit and vegetable intakes in Europe. It also has one of the worst heart disease records in the world. Other diet-related health problems, such as obesity, are also on the increase. Many children in the UK have very restricted diets and fail to eat even the minimum recommended levels of fruit and vegetables. These low consumption levels inflict not only the misery of ill health on countless individuals, but also a huge financial burden on the nation, which has to meet the costs of remedial health treatment and lost working days.

Begun in 1992, the Bangor Food and Activity Research Unit (BFARU), under the direction of Professor Fergus Lowe and Dr Pauline Horne, has pursued extensive research designed to identify the key psychological factors influencing children's food choice. On the basis of that knowledge, an intervention has been devised that enables children to enjoy eating healthy diets, rich in fruit and vegetables—the Food Dude Healthy Eating Programme. The Food Dude Programme incorporates two key elements: (1) video adventures featuring hero figures the Food Dudes who enjoy eating fruit and vegetables and provide effective social models for the children to imitate; and (2) small rewards (e.g., Food Dude stickers, pens and rulers) to ensure that the children begin to taste the foods.

The Programme succeeds in overcoming obstacles in the way of children tasting fruit and vegetables and learning to like them. It does this in two ways. Firstly, it provides opportunities for children to see and hear others react positively to these foods. Secondly, it encourages children to repeatedly eat those foods. As a result, their conceptions of themselves as individuals who "like" or "eat" fruit and vegetables alter accordingly. With repeated tastings also, the taste of those foods may come to be increasingly discriminated and liked (or, at least, not disliked).

Early BFARU studies involving more than 450 children between the ages of 2 and 7 years in homes, schools and nurseries, confirmed that use of these principles brings about major and long lasting increases in children's consumption of fruit and vegetables. For example, in one nursery study, lunchtime vegetable consumption rose from 20% to 89% and, in the case of fruit, from an initial 17% to 76% fifteen months later. In primary school settings, even when popular sweet and savoury snacks were presented alongside fruit and vegetables, fruit consumption of 5-6 year olds more than doubled from an initial level of 28% to 59% six months later, whilst vegetable consumption increased 4-fold, from 8% to 32%.

The BFARU, has now developed the Food Dude Programme as a self-contained whole-school package that can be administered autonomously by primary schools themselves across the full age range of their pupils. New materials were developed and tested in primary schools in Harwell (Oxfordshire), Bangor (North Wales), Salford (Manchester) and Brixton (South London) with over 1,100 children aged 4-11 years. In all schools, the Food Dude Programme resulted in highly significant increases in pupils' fruit and vegetable consumption. Some of the largest percentage increases were seen in the most socially-deprived areas. For example, in Salford, lunchtime consumption of fruit increased by 150% and vegetables by 315%.

The work conducted by the BFARU has resulted in an effective method for bringing about substantial increases in children's consumption of fruit and vegetables. If the Food Dude Programme were to be introduced into primary schools throughout the UK, it could have major health and other benefits for these children and their families, particularly in helping to prevent coronary heart disease and cancer. The Programme will be especially valuable for those children from lower socio-economic groups who are in most need of dietary improvements, thus helping to significantly reduce health inequalities across the country.

In response to the growing problem of child obesity in the UK, the BFARU are also investigating ways of increasing physical activity levels to complement the improvements in diet brought about by the Food Dude Programme. Initial findings suggest that an intervention, modelled closely on the Food Dude Programme, is very effective in increasing physical activity in primary school children. This intervention incorporates fictional role models (the “Fit n’ Fun Dudes”) and rewards; the children also wear pedometers to enable them to monitor their physical activity levels. In the future, there is great potential to combine the physical activity intervention with the existing Food Dude Programme to provide a two-pronged and highly effective approach to child obesity prevention.

For more information about the Food Dude Programme and physical activity research, visit the Food Dudes website.