The overarching goal of this study was to increase tomato intake in children through the use of a multifaceted educational intervention. Five preschool classrooms at the Child Care Center at Hort Woods participated in this study. Children were given a sample of tomatoes of known weight at the beginning of the study. Consumption was recorded as pretest data. During the following four weeks, all children participated in lessons once per week that focused on growing, harvesting, the benefits of consuming, and cooking with tomatoes. Each lesson involved an interactive activity and tomato-based snack. After the final lesson was completed, children were again given a known weight of tomatoes, and consumption was recorded. Subjective opinions of tomatoes from the children and survey data on typical eating behaviors provided by parents were also collected to evaluate these influences on consumption. Overall the intervention was successful in increasing average intake of tomatoes by 2.61 grams. Additionally, the intervention was found to be most effective for those children who consumed very little of their tomato sample during the pretest. In general, parental child-feeding practices and children’s usual dietary patterns were not associated with tomato consumption before or after the intervention, although the strongest effects were noted for children whose parents reported a higher frequency of tomato and tomato-based consumption at home. Based on the results of this study, we have found that a multifaceted approach to education on a target food can influence preschool-aged children to consume more of that food item.
