Design and rationale for evaluating salad bars and students' fruit and vegetable consumption: A cluster randomized factorial trial with objective assessments.

ABSTRACT: Building healthy fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption habits early in life is critical for primary prevention. However, U.S. youth do not come close to meeting national recommendations for FV intake. School-lunch salad bars are one of the most heavily promoted ways to meet FV guidelines. Contrary to popular belief, no rigorous randomized trials have examined whether salad bars increase students' FV consumption. This paper describes the design and rationale of a federally funded trial to evaluate whether introducing salad bars in elementary, middle, and high schools affects students' FV consumption and waste during lunch. A cluster factorial randomized trial will test new salad bars against waitlist controls, with and without an additional marketing intervention (N = 36 schools, N = 6804 st

SUBMITTER: Adams MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6392069 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature