Policy Intervention With Potential: Forbid Unhealthy Snacks And Sell Fruit

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Main Category: Nutrition / Diet
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health;  Public Health
Article Date: 13 May 2008 - 0:00 PST

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According to a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, children are more likely to eat more fruit if unhealthy snacks are banned from schools and schools run fruit tuck shops.

Tuck shops are small retailers that typically sell items like candies, crisps (potato chips), and carbonated beverages. They are commonly found in schools and youth clubs around the UK, South Africa, and Australia. Recently, the UK government has been concerned with the diets of school children and has been focusing on policies that promote more healthy lifestyles. One initiative is to intervene with the food choices in tuck shops.

To study the effects of restrictions on tuck shops, researchers at Cardiff University analyzed the eating habits of student aged 9 to 11 years old at 43 primary schools. The schools were in relatively poorer areas of South Wales and South West England and had different policies on what types of food students could bring to school. Some schools had no restrictions, some only allowed fruit, and other forbade any food at all.

The policy intervention affected 23 schools and required that they start fruit tuck shops that would offer several fruits at a fixed price. These schools would also not sell sweets and crisps. All of the schools maintained their existing policies about what students could or could not bring to school.

At the end of one year, the tuck shops sold about 70,000 pieces of fruit - about 0.06 pieces of fruit per student per day. The researchers surveyed the children to find out how much fruit and other snacks they had eaten the previous day. The survey contained questions about individual behavior and also about the eating habits of peers such as how much fruit they were eating regularly at school.

The mere presence of a fruit tuck shop did not have a significant impact on how much fruit children consumed at school. Children in schools with fruit tuck shops were more likely to indicate that both they and their friends ate fruit regularly, but the amount of fruit that they ate the day before was not significantly greater than what was reported by children who did not have fruit tuck shops in their schools.

The most interesting policy impact was found in schools that had fruit tuck shops along with policies that forbade students to bring food or only allowed fruit to be brought to school. Compared to children in schools that did not have a fruit tuck shop, children in tuck-shop schools in which only fruit was allowed to be brought consumed 0.37 more portions of fruit per day. Children in schools that forbade any type of food to be brought consumed 0.14 more fruit portions each day. At schools that did not have restrictions on what type of food could be brought, children consumed less fruit than in other schools - whether or not the school had a fruit tuck shop.

The lead author of the study, professor Laurence Moore (Cardiff Institute of Society, Health and Ethics), said: "Our results suggest that children are more willing to use fruit tuck shops and eat fruit as a snack at school if they and their friends are not allowed to take in unhealthy snacks. This highlights the importance of friends' behaviour and of peer modelling, and of the need for schools to put policies in place to back up health interventions.

The impact of school fruit tuck shops and school food policies on children's fruit consumption: a cluster randomised trial of schools in deprived areas
L Moore and K Tapper
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. (2008)
doi:10.1136/jech.2007.070953
Click Here to View Journal Website

Written by: Peter M Crosta

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