Strategies that Impact Students' Eating Habits

I imagine there isn't a school leader in the world that hasn't struggled with cafeterias or kids eating habits.  Healthy diets are not only a hard sell to school cafeterias looking to sustain themselves financially, they are a hard sell to our students who almost naturally love french fries and instant noodles.  At CIS we have the additional challenge of being a truly international school with kids coming to us directly from so many different countries, each having their own traditional foods and tastes. Appealing to our all our young student's food preferences is particularly difficult in India, a country renowned for adding masala to everything. The result was we tended to see many of our American, Japanese or French student's plates filled only with white rice or chapati. This was a real worry for staff and parents given that we have a long school day, it is often hot, and instruction at our school is usually hands on and fairly engaging. Students ran the risk of running out of energy in the afternoon. 

As a school we frequently asked ourselves how can we change our students eating habits? How can we get students eating more?  Both answers go hand in hand. 

Looking back I feel that our strategy has been successful. The following post provides an overview of the strategies we used in hopes that it may give other school leaders facing a similar problem some ideas.  1- Healthy Food Guide

The first initiative we started, back when students only chose chapatti's and rice was two part. 

Since our goal was getting students to eat more, we started an education program called the Balanced Food Guide.  In class teachers would use the posters we made (photo below) to talk to students about why each food group was important to them. Then, before lunch, encourage students to ensure that two or three colours where represented on their plates.  

When the students arrive at the cafeteria each day, the food trays are labelled with the corresponding food group using a colour tag.  We also inform parents of the colour chart and encourage them to talk with their children about having multiple food groups on their plate.

Slowly but surely, this translated into students allowing themselves to be exposed to a larger variety of diet. However we noticed they still weren’t eating enough because there weren’t options that suited them. The food we were serving our students often catered to older secondary students more than elementary or kindergarten. 

2- Menu changes

As students tried to choose a wider variety of foods we realised that they were not able to because everything from vegetables to meat was either presented in an unappealing way or had too much masala and spices.

For elementary and kindergarten we began by simplifying the menu. Providing roast chicken instead of spicy chicken and separating the mixed vegetables so that students can select only the vegetables they liked. We surveyed students to see what types of foods they liked to eat and began serving some of those items. And lastly, we expanded our salad bar and worked hard to promote kid friendly salads in homeroom. 

Also, sugar is an important part of the Indian diet. We used to have a big bowl of sugar sitting beside the curd which was being abused by some students, so we simply just took that away.

3- Random Rewards

Finally, the teachers on supervision duty thought it would be effectives to reward students who served and ate a balanced healthy plate of food with Moose Points (our school's positive reward program). These rewards were handed out on a random reward schedule every other day to start and then less frequently.

At the beginning some students may have been trying for Moose Points, however eventually students became accustomed to putting healthy food on their plate and began to enjoy eating it.

What is our evidence of success?

One easy indicator of success is an extremely popular and busy salad bar. 

The other thing I noticed is that we used to have to literally force students to stay a minimum of 15 minutes in the cafeteria using a red card/green card system as they would not eat and be eager to run out to the playground. Recently, a large number of students are taking more time to eat and staying well past the green card is turned.

In the following video the green card is on the wall and almost half our students are still relaxed and eating. 

While the above description is definitely an oversimplified account of all the thought and hard work that was required by our staff to change our students eating habits, we hope that it provides other schools with some ideas, a starting point. 

We realise that our success will take sustained effort and that we will have to continue to implement and use these strategies if we want our positive food culture to keep going.

Thanks for reading. Email me if you want more details.

Martin

#eatinghabits #development