write a report writing about food sale in school about 150- 200 words
Answers
1. Introduction
With 14% of young people in The Netherlands being overweight [1], the prevalence of overweight continues to grow, and many teenagers have an unhealthy food pattern containing too much saturated fats, sugars, and a lack of dietary fibre [2]. The fact that children spend many hours at school each day, including lunchtime, causes the school environment to be an important out of home setting where children consume at least one main meal a day. Almost 90% of all secondary schools in The Netherlands have a school cafeteria and/or soft drink vending machines, and 80% have vending machines selling snacks and candy bars [3]. With one in three schools selling pizza and one in five selling deep-fried products, almost half of all schools selling candy bars and a lack of fresh fruit in 57% of the schools [3], there is still a lot to improve when it comes to offering healthy foods in the school cafeteria. In this paper, we will first elaborate on why it is important to offer healthy food in school cafeterias and then introduce the Healthy School Canteen programme, an intervention that is aimed at making the school food environment healthier. In the remainder of this paper, we will discuss a descriptive study that was conducted to assess perceptions and opinions of parties that (have) participate(d) in the programme.
The idea that environmental factors can be important in shaping human behaviour is not new. In the 1930s, Lewin already emphasizes in his field theory that both the person and the environment need to be taken into consideration when studying human behaviour [4]. Lewin, considered to be the founding father of social psychology, conventionalised human behaviour as a function of both the person and the environment. This idea became known as Lewin’s equation:
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. From this heuristic, it follows that behaviour is the result of an interplay of one’s personal characteristics and the situation (that contains both physical and social elements) in which the person operates. This perspective provides a useful starting point from which to consider eating behaviour. Specifically, it could help to explain that good and strong intentions to eat healthily (person factors) are most of the time not enough to prevent people from making unhealthy food choices. Rather, temptations that lurk in one’s direct environment such as the smell of hamburgers or seeing friends eating candy bars can be very powerful in shaping people’s actual eating behaviour.
Although Lewin’s equation was quite revolutionary in his days and sparked some debate among fellow scientists, his conceptualization is widely acknowledged nowadays. Also, in the domain of eating behaviour, there is ample evidence now that environmental cues can influence people’s eating decisions, both consciously and unconsciously. For example, research has demonstrated that the way food is presented, portioned, and packaged in one’s direct environment can affect the amount of food that one consumes. Specifically, larger serving portions and packages usually allure people to consume more food, which in turn leads to greater energy intake [5, 6]. In addition, the accessibility and presentation of foods can influence people’s food choices in such a way that the more accessible or easy to reach certain types of food are, the more they are being consumed .
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