School salad bars improve students' diet

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- Elementary schools interested in increasing the number of fruits and vegetables students eat should offer a salad bar, a U.S. study says.

The study, published in Public Health Nutrition, finds that salad bars increased students' fruit and vegetable consumption by 2.97 to 4.07 times daily. The study also found that having a salad bar reduces the students' mean daily caloric, cholesterol, saturated fat and total fat consumption.

"One of the major contributing factors to the high rate of overweight children in the United States is that they do not consume the daily recommended servings of fruits and vegetables," lead author Dr. Wendy Slusser, of Mattel Children's Hospital and the University of California at Los Angeles, said in a statement. "Increasing the availability and accessibility to healthy foods is one way to improve children's diets. In turn, this sets up opportunities for kids to have repeated exposure to healthy food and positively impact their choices."

Study participants included 337 children in grades 2 through 5. Children were interviewed using a 24-hour food-recall questionnaire, both before and after the salad bar intervention -- in 1998 and 2000, respectively.