A school can get kids to eat healthier with $34, a clever menu writer and a rearranging of food and furniture, according to Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab.
Brian Wansink, the lab's director, makes convincing arguments backed by case studies in upstate New York schools that better nutrition and fighting childhood obesity doesn't need to be a battle of wills in the lunch room.
Subtle changes in students' surroundings can unconsciously coax kids to choose apples over apple pie.
"We need to rearrange our environment so we mindlessly eat less," says Wansink, author of the bestseller "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think."
Wansink and his colleagues logged surprising results in testing the principles espoused in earlier studies, such as the way larger plates and wider glasses lead people to eat and drink more without realizing it.
Case in point : Salad sales were flailing at a middle school in Corning, N.Y., and officials wondered if they needed to boost selection or subsidize prices. Instead, the school moved the salad bar away from the wall and into the center of the room so students have to walk around it to get to the cash register, nearly tripling sales.
Conversely, putting chocolate milk behind the plain milk and keeping ice cream in a freezer that does not have a see-through door led kids to skip those items more often.
Small, incremental changes will have a ripple effect, Wansink says.
