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This
Thisweek–
week–
–Vegetables have an image problem–
Can the Food Dudes get kids to choose broccoli over
burgers? Obesity-hit nations are desperately hoping so
ANDY COGHLAN
CHARLIE, Tom, Raz and Rocco are
superheroes on a mission to save
the world from General Junk,
whose evil plan is to destroy the
world by stealing all its fruit and
vegetables. Luckily, these “Food
Dudes” have superpowers that
spring into action whenever they
eat their greens. In completing
their mission, the Food Dudes
also hope to save the lives of
millions of real children who risk
early death from cancer, heart
disease and diabetes because they
refuse to eat fruit and vegetables.
Corny, yes. But governments
and child nutritionists in Europe,
the US and Canada are taking the
8 | NewScientist | 21 July 2007
Food Dudes very, very seriously.
The programme has
outperformed all others in its
capacity to wean children onto
foods they almost universally
dislike on first tasting. With
childhood obesity rates
continuing to rise in western
countries, new approaches to
get kids to eat more healthily
are desperately needed. Earlier
this month, an Associated Press
evaluation of 57 healthy-eating
initiatives in US schools showed
that just four had any impact
on fruit and vegetable
consumption, and even those
impacts were minimal.
Meanwhile, a study published
last week revealed that a
Dudes programme on fun will
transfer to the US,” says Karen
Jetter of the University of
California, Davis.
Key to the Food Dudes’ success
is peer pressure, and the
behavioural changes it brings
about. Previous schemes simply
reeled off messages about the
need to eat fruit and veg and left
kids to tuck in. “You can’t force
kids to eat things – you have to
bring them with you, and failure
to do that is an error made by
people who don’t understand
behaviour,” says Fergus Lowe,
who co-developed the Food Dudes
FOOD DUDES 2006
Superheroes battle
the forces of junk
£120 million “free fruit” scheme
introduced in UK schools in
2004 also failed to work. Janet
Cade and her colleagues at the
University of Leeds showed that
although children initially ate an
extra half-a-fruit portion at
school, they lost interest after
about seven months, and many
ended up eating less fruit at home
because parents thought they
were getting their fill at school
(Journal of Epidemiology and
Community Health, DOI: 10.1136/
jech.2006.052696).
So could the Food Dudes be the
answer? The government of the
Republic of Ireland is already sold
on the idea. It was so impressed
by results from an ongoing
pilot trial of the programme in
150 Irish primary schools that
in February it decided to end the
trial prematurely after two years
and launch it nationwide to all
children aged 4 to 11. The full
roll-out will begin in September.
Trials are also under way in the
UK and Italy, while California
and Canada are preparing for
pilot trials too.
“I think the focus of the Food
–What’s their secret?–
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In this section
● Dark enery particles go chameleonic, page 10
● Meat is environmental murder, page 15
● How to grow old while staying young, page 15
programme at the University of
Wales, Bangor. “Our focus is
on behaviour change and
psychological principles.”
In essence, the Food Dudes
programme attempts to
convince children to try fruit and
vegetables again and again until
they actually begin to like the
taste. “If you eat a food repeatedly
for 10 to 15 times, you learn to like
it,” says Lowe. “It educates and
habituates the taste buds, but you
need to repeatedly eat the food for
this to happen.”
Spread over 16 school days,
the six episodes of Food Dudes
keep the children “on message”
long enough for them to love
what they once hated, he says.
Children take home educational
packs for their parents containing
charts to monitor home
consumption of fruit and
vegetables, and are also rewarded
for their efforts with pencils,
pens, stickers and pencil cases.
Lowe says that the children’s
enthusiasm for the dudes and
their message provides a
powerful counterfoil to the massmarketing of junk foods on TV
and elsewhere (see “Fighting flab
on TV”, right).
The results have been
“overwhelming”, says Michael
Maloney of the Irish
government’s Food Board, who
has played a key role in overseeing
the pilot studies in Ireland. The
pilot in six schools during 2002
and 2003 showed that on average,
participants’ daily consumption
of fruit rose from 49 to 93 grams
over the course of a year.
The most impressive results
were in the 20 per cent of children
who ate the least fruit and veg at
the outset. Their consumption
rose from 1 gram to 52 grams on
average, suggesting that the most
nutritionally deprived children
would benefit most.
Preliminary results for the
much larger pilot study of
150 schools also look good, says
Maloney, although the final
analysis is not yet complete.
They suggest that 90 per cent of
participants are now eating one or
more portions of fruit per day,
www.newscientist.com
instead of none at the outset. And
vegetable consumption is up
from zero to at least one portion a
day in 80 per cent of kids.
What’s more, earlier trials in
British schools suggested the
benefits lasted at least 18 months
after the children watched the
episodes of the Food Dudes
(European Journal of Clinical
Nutrition, DOI: 10.1038/sj.
ejcn.1601838 and DOI: 10.1038/
sj.ejcn.1602024), suggesting that
the children retain their taste for
fruit and vegetables.
Maloney urges all countries to
give it a try. It costs about £35 per
child, which would be a wise
investment if it weans them for
life onto a diet that helps prevent
obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart
disease. “It’s a one-off investment
“The most impressive results
were in the 20 per cent of
children who ate the least fruit
and veg at the outset”
in every child, so the cost-benefit
is a no-brainer,” says Maloney.
No wonder then that other
countries are interested in the
Food Dudes. “Convincing children
in particular to consume the
recommended daily amounts
of fruit and veg is a major
challenge,” says Ron Lemaire,
director of the Canadian Produce
Marketing Association in
Ottawa – a country where obesity
rates for children have tripled
in 25 years, and the level of
people either overweight or obese
has grown 70 per cent. “We’re in
the process of looking at the
potential of running a pilot for
the Food Dudes programme in
Canada,” he says.
Likewise, Jetter is hoping
to kick-start a programme in
California. In the US, adult
obesity rates doubled between
1980 and 2000, and the incidence
of overweight has doubled among
children and tripled among
adolescents since 1980. Likewise,
in the US only 25 per cent of adults
eat the recommended five daily
servings of fruit, and even fewer
adolescents do so. ●
FIGHTING FLAB ON TV
However successful the Food Dudes
programme is, children will still face a
torrent of tempting TV ads for unhealthy
food. The good news is that research
from Australia suggests that “counter
adverts” promoting healthy foods do
register with children and can change
their eating habits.
“Changing the food advertising
environment to one where nutritious
foods are promoted and junk foods are
relatively unrepresented would help to
normalise and reinforce healthy
eating,” says Helen Dixon of the Centre
for Behavioural Research in Cancer at
the Cancer Council Victoria in Carlton,
Victoria. “From our experiment,
children who viewed healthy food ads
showed significantly more positive
attitudes towards [healthy] foods
compared with beforehand,” she says.
More than 900 children from schools
in Melbourne participated in the study,
which tested their attitudes to healthy
eating and probed their TV viewing
habits. It showed that junk food
advertisements, which account for 81
per cent of food ads on commercial TV in
Australia, do exert an influence on
children’s eating habits.
Children who watched 28 hours of
TV per week were 18 per cent more
likely than those who watched 7 hours
to have positive attitudes to junk foods,
and were 14 per cent more likely to like
junk food. When the children viewed
adverts for healthy as well as junk food,
the researchers found that the healthyeating message did register, despite the
ads for junk food.
“Our results support the proposition
that increasing the number of ads for
nutritious food at times when children
watch TV may serve to promote the
appeal of these foods,” says Dixon,
whose team’s results appear online in
Social Science & Medicine (DOI: 10.1016/j.
socscimed.2007.05.011).
HEAVY LEVY
Taxing unhealthy food could save as
many as 3200 Britons from strokes and
heart attacks each year, a study by
epidemiologists has found. However,
critics say a “fat tax” would hit the poor
hardest because they spend 30 per cent
of their income on food, twice the
proportion spent by richer households.
A team led by Mike Rayner of the
University of Oxford estimated the
impact of a “fat tax” on health. They
applied three tax scenarios to genuine
data on food purchasing and
consumption in the UK in 2000. In the
first scenario, only dairy foods rich in
unhealthy saturated fats were taxed.
Paradoxically, they found that deaths
from strokes and heart attacks would
increase by between 1900 and 4000 per
year. That’s because consumers would
switch to cheaper, untaxed products
such as carbohydrates loaded with extra
salt, which raises the risk of heart
attacks by increasing blood pressure.
In the second scenario, Rayner and
his colleagues taxed foods according to
a standard nutrition rating that assigns
a “healthiness” score to foods based on
eight nutritional parameters including
iron content and total calories. When
Rayners team applied tax to all food
items scoring as “unhealthy”, it led to
2300 fewer deaths each year.
The third, most successful scenario
was when the team taxed all items
containing salt, sugar and fat. This
saved 3200 lives (Journal of
Epidemiology and Community Health,
DOI: 10.1136/jech.2006.047746).
Critics complain that this last regime
would disproportionately hit the
poorest households, raising their food
expenses by 4.6 per cent. “The likely
outcome of this is that fresh foods like
fruit, vegetables and meats are left out
of the shopping to compensate,” says
Ann Hobbiss of the Food Policy Unit at
the University of Bradford, UK.
Rayner says the regime could be
made fairer for the poor if the resulting
revenue was used to subsidise fruit and
vegetables. He says the government
would also need to impose measures
such as restrictions on advertising
junk food for the policy to have
maximum impact.
21 July 2007 | NewScientist | 9