Healthy eating program scrutinized
Critique reveals ‘significantly more’ nutritional diet found in study amounts to a single bite of an apple
The Department of Agriculture has invested seven years and several million dollars in a popular program that claims it gets students to eat significantly more fruits and vegetables.
But as a recent critique of the research behind the program reveals, “significantly more” often means an amount as small as a single bite of an apple.
The critique, which was published on the platform PeerJ in August, alleges that researchers have exaggerated the benefits of a program that is now used as a model for healthy eating in schools.
The paper raises questions about the efficacy of the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, which has been adopted by more than 30,000 schools across the U.S. since its launch in 2010.
In addition to the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, USDA has devoted millions of dollars to improving the nutrition of school meals and encouraging food-stamp recipients to buy more produce.
Both efforts produced results on par with a single bite of apple, said David Just, the co-director of Cornell University’s Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition, the research group that administers the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement.
Since 2010, the USDA-funded Smarter Lunchrooms program has often been held up as a model for persuading children to make healthier choices.
Using the principles of behavioral economics, a field that studies why people make decisions, Smarter Lunchrooms encourages school food service workers to make cosmetic changes that “nudge” students toward healthier choices. Administrators may place fruits in attractive baskets, for instance.
Schools that adopt these techniques can earn awards of up to $2,000 from USDA.
But the research methods employed by the Smarter Lunchrooms team have fallen under scrutiny. Six months ago, after one of the team’s directors published a blog post that described unorthodox methods, a team of three independent researchers raised concerns about a number of the lab’s papers.
Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, accused the lab of using statistical manipulations designed to make its findings look more significant.
More recently, Eric Robinson, a behavioral scientist at the University of Liverpool who researches eating behavior and obesity, reviewed a series of BEN Center papers that informed the Smarter Lunchrooms techniques. He found that several appeared to exaggerate the available data or overgeneralize their findings.
In one instance, a series of interventions that were said to “significantly” increase children’s fruit consumption only led them to eat the equivalent of an extra one-tenth of a small apple per day — the aforementioned apple bite.
In another paper, the Cornell researchers concluded that giving vegetable dishes fun names “persistently increased” vegetable consumption. In reality, however, the study only looked at how many vegetables kids put on their plates, not how many they actually ate, over an extended time period.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for USDA said the agency had raised some concerns with the BEN Center and that they were being reviewed. But there is no plan to remove Smarter Lunchrooms from schools.
“It’s important to remember that Smarter Lunchrooms strategies are based upon widely researched principles of behavioral economics, as well as a strong body of practice that supports their ongoing use,” the spokeswoman said.