A groundbreaking study from Cornell University has revealed that providing nutritious meals to children can promote healthier weight, even if they don’t immediately develop a love for salads. The study tracked nearly 300 low-income families in the UK over three years, testing the impact of dietary changes on body mass index (BMI). The findings suggest that parents can positively influence their children’s health by modifying what they serve, without imposing unfamiliar foods. This study highlights the potential of affordable meal delivery services to address childhood obesity in underserved communities. Childhood obesity and healthy eating are crucial topics in public health.
By Helping Parents Build Healthier Habits
Led by Professor Michèle Belot from Cornell University, the study aimed to find out what impact those mealtime makeovers have on childrens is health in later life. The study followed almost 300 low-income UK families for three years, allowing researchers to test various ways of improving family diets.
Nutritionist-designed meal kits for five days a week were provided to one group of families and another was asked to have three meals at routine times per day and not snack. The other group served as a control, continuing their usual diets. The findings were clear: while the intervention groups experienced a decrease in the share of children 2 to 6 years old beginning in higher BMI percentiles, this proportion rose among their counterparts who served as controls.
Impact on Children’s Health or Life Sustainable
While the BMI improvements that included meal kits were maintained over three years, any benefits provided by limiting snacking disappeared after only a year. This finding indicates the potential durability of influence from the meal kit approach on children’s added sugar intake.
The parents who received the meal kits were still feeding their children healthier diets, even though their changes hadn’t necessarily transferred to themselves at this point, says Belot. Belot said, “It is not that the children turned into sudden fans and connoisseurs of broccoli and salad one day,” “Instead, it seems that parents may have eased up a little on the kinds of foods they put in front of their kids, limiting their exposure to unhealthy options.”
Not Just the Economics of Takeout
If parents bought all prepared meals away from home,16-week delivery of $5 lunch and dinner family meal packs would have the same effect on childhood obesity as a 25-cent per serving price increase in schools over 10 years. Subsidized meal delivery services could go a long way to cutting childhood obesity in better-off groups, Belot noted “They might be useful for lowering obesity in lower income families as well, provided they are made affordable,” she concluded.
…The researchers stress that one important step is to be careful so that the food on the plate does not become too dominant in junk food. You can control the plate as a parent,” says Belot, “and I think that’ so empowering in the end. Children eat for this reason, if they are hungry. The authors conclude that their findings suggest a low-cost, simple intervention may “have long-term health benefits for children,” even if the end result is not to get kids to happily down kale.
