Snack It Up for Parents

The overall goal of Snack It Up research (funded by Newman's Own Foundation) is to develop and evaluate multiple strategies to improve the healthfulness of children’s snacks. The Snack It Up for Parents component involved the development of the brief videos and tip sheets to help parents in providing healthier snacks to their children. The videos and tip sheets are posted here. All three videos promote small changes to build parents’ self-efficacy. The first video suggests changes (“nudges”) within the home to encourage easy access to vegetable snacks. The second video encourages family vegetable taste tests to promote parent modeling and child exposure to vegetables, and to increase parent knowledge of their children’s preferred vegetables. The final video encourages preparing simple vegetable snacks together, again to promote parent modeling, and also based on evidence that children are more likely to eat vegetables that they have helped prepare. The accompanying tip sheets offer preparation tips and recipes with time and cost information. These materials were developed iteratively and evaluated using quantitative and qualitative methods.