In-home eating “rules” may improve teens’ diet
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A team of dietitians and nutritionists in California say they’ve identified a number of promising ways to help adolescents make healthier food choices—like reaching for fruits and vegetables instead of cookies and sweets.
Dr. Marion F. Zabinski from the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues used an online questionnaire to determine psychological and social factors that correlated with fruit, vegetable, and dietary fat intake among 878 girls and boys ages 11 to 15 years.
The researchers also interviewed the adolescents on multiple occasions to ask about what they had eaten the day before.
Among the team’s findings, healthy “household eating rules” emerged as one of “the most consistently supported correlates” of fruit and vegetable and fat intake among the adolescents.
These rules included having healthful snacks available at home, eating vegetables with dinner and fruit with breakfast, and limiting certain foods like sweet snacks, desserts, and soda.
Parents can provide a healthful food environment, at least at home, by making sure healthy food choices are consistently available and promoted, the researchers note in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
“Teaching parents about the value of household rules for healthful foods may be an important component of interventions for adolescents of all ages,” they write.
Child “behavior change” strategies, such as setting goals to eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, were also strongly related to fruit, vegetable and fat intake.
Teaching behavior-change techniques may be particularly effective for adolescents age 13 and older, given that these older adolescents are beginning to make more decisions for themselves about what they eat and don’t eat.
Although “increasing reliance on peer influence is often discussed as a hallmark of adolescent development,” peer influences did not seem to have much effect on dietary choices, the team found.
SOURCE: Journal of the American Dietetic Association, June 2006.
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