How to get your kids to eat their fruits and veggies

By Stephen Beech via SWNS

Parents wanting their kids to eat more fruit and veggies should make them sit at the dinner table for an extra 10 minutes, suggests new research.

They ate, on average, 100 grams more fruits and vegetables - the equivalent of about one of the five recommended daily portions, according to the findings.

The extra amount is as much as a small apple or a small bell pepper, a German research team says.

Their experiment shows that children will eat "significantly more" fruit and vegetables if they stay at the table for an average of 30 minutes instead of 20 minutes.

Dr. Jutta Mata, a professor of health psychology at the University of Mannheim, said: “This outcome has practical importance for public health because one additional daily portion of fruit and vegetables reduces the risk of cardiometabolic disease by six to seven per cent.

“For such an effect, a sufficient quantity of fruits and vegetables must be available on the table – bite-sized pieces are best."

Fifty pairs of parents and 50 children participated in the study. The children in the study were an average of 8-years-old while the average age of the moms and dads was 43. An equal number of boys and girls took part.

Participants were served a typical German dinner with sliced bread, cold cuts, and cheese, as well as fruits and vegetables cut into bite-sized pieces.

Professor Ralph Hertwig, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, said: "The duration of the meal is one of the central components of a family meal which parents can vary to improve the diet of their children.

"We had already found hints of this relation in a meta-analysis on studies looking at the qualitative components of healthy family meals."

He added: "In this new experimental study, we were able to prove a formerly only correlative relationship."

The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, also showed that longer family meals did not lead to the children eating more bread or cold cuts, nor did they eat more dessert.

The research team assumed that the bite-sized pieces of fruit and veg were easier to eat and thus more enticing.