School gardens do little to make children eat more fruit and veg, research finds

Little evidence exists to suggest that school gardening initiatives alone improve children’s fruit and vegetable intake, concludes research led by an academic at Leeds Metropolitan University.

Meaghan Christian, a researcher in the Institute for Health & Wellbeing at Leeds Metropolitan (which becomes Leeds Beckett University on 22 September), carried out two randomised controlled trials of primary school children aged 8–11 from eight London boroughs using the Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) Campaign for School Gardening, to discover whether school gardening initiatives had any effect on fruit and vegetable intake among the participating pupils.

The study, published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity Public Health Research, concluded that school gardening alone does not improve fruit and vegetable intake and highlights the need for more sophisticated and accurate tools to evaluate diet in children.

'Children’s fruit and vegetable intake in the UK is low and changing that intake can prove challenging,' said Christian. 'But for school gardening to improve children’s fruit and vegetable intake, it needs to be successfully integrated into the school curriculum and environment. The results from this study suggest using a holistic approach and incorporating nutrition education or cooking along with parental involvement would be more likely to achieve higher consumption levels and increase children’s knowledge.'

Eating meals together as a family, even if only twice a week, boosts children’s daily fruit and vegetable intake

Findings from the study also showed that eating a family meal together, cutting up fruit and vegetables, and parental modelling of fruit and vegetable consumption were all associated with higher intakes of fruit and vegetables in children.

The study is the first to use clustered randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of a gardening intervention to evaluate the impact of school gardening. A 24-hour food diary [the Child and Diet Evaluation Tool (CADET)] collected information about dietary intake, while questionnaires measured children’s knowledge and attitudes towards fruit and vegetables. Changes in fruit and vegetable intake were analysed using a random effects model, based on intention to treat.

Previous research by Christian demonstrated that eating meals together as a family, even if only twice a week, boosts children’s daily fruit and vegetable intake to near the recommended five a day.

The study of primary school-aged children, funded by the National Institute for Health Research Public Health Research (NIHR PHR) Programme, also suggested parental consumption of fruit and vegetables and cutting up portions of these foods boosted the amount their children would eat.