Nudging and boosting children’s restaurant menus for healthier food choice: a blinded quasi-randomized controlled trial in a real life setting

Background Restaurants are ideal settings for implementing food interventions targeted at children. Studies with adults suggest that changes to the physical menu can lead to healthier food choices; online studies with parents indicate that specific menu designs facilitate healthier choices. However, it is unknown whether applying well-established nudging and boosting methods to children’s menus also increases their choice of healthier meals in a real-world restaurant setting. Methods The effects of two versions of a restaurant menu on the frequency of choosing a healthy meal (newly created, healthy target dish) were tested in a blinded quasi-randomized controlled trial. The menu in the control condition contained all dishes (including the healthy target dish) in a standardized format. The intervention menu included nudging (e.g. comic character, fun attractive name for the dish) and boosting elements (e.g. information on low calorie density) next to the healthy target dish. Over five months, the control and intervention menus were switched every two weeks and records were made of how often the healthy target dish was ordered. Results In total, 607 orders were made from the children’s restaurant menu (57% from the intervention menu). During the intervention phase, 4.2% of all ordered dishes from the children’s menu were the healthy target dish, during the control phase, 4.4% of orders were for the target dish (p=.896). Conclusions Contrary to our hypothesis, a modified children’s menu did not lead to a significant increase in the number of orders for a healthy dish compared with a neutral control menu. Importantly, given that parents and children often choose the child’s dish together, particularly boosting methods that focus on social processes and joint decision making could be promising to increase children’s frequency of healthy food choices in restaurants. Trial registration DRKS00027039, registered on 11/22/2021, (Retrospectively registered).

CALORIE DENSITY AND NUTRIENT CONTENT OF COMMONLY CONSUMED SWEETMEATS OF JASHORE DISTRICT IN BANGLADESH

The purpose of the current study was to analyze the nutrient content of some commonly consumed sweetmeats of Jashore district in Bangladesh and calculation of the their calorie densities. The selected samples for the study were as follows: Rosogolla (sponge, white), Kalojam, Laddu (mewa), Chomchom (black, brown, white), Shondesh (para, chinir, cake), Doi (mishit, tok, tok-mishti). Sweetmeats were collected from three different popular shops of Jahsore Sadar in Jashore district during the period of October, 2019 to December, 2019. Proximate analysis of the samples was conducted in triplicate by various standard methods and calorie densities were calculated by amount of energy per gram of food. Ash content ranged from 2 to 5.33%, moisture content ranged from 25.66 to 69.3%, protein content ranged from 2.19 to 4.05%, fat content ranged from 0.64 to 2.55%. In case of dietary fiber, highest fiber content was found in laddu (1.37%) and lowest fiber content was found in kalojam (0.73%). However, carbohydrate content was measured by subtraction method and highest carbohydrate content was found in chinir sondesh (64%) and lowest carbohydrate content was found in tok doi (22.68%). Afterwards, Sweets were ranked in descending order according to their calorie densities. It was seen that chinir sondesh was the most calorie densed foods and tok doi was the least amongst the studied samples. KEYWORDS: Calorie density, nutrient, sweetmeats, Jashore, Bangladesh.