How accurate are school children in assessing what they have consumed of the packed lunch or school meal? A PhD project explored methods which can be used to describe and evaluate what in fact school children eat.
School children get more than one third of their daily energy during school hours, lunch constituting the biggest contribution to their energy intake. But do school children have a realistic perception of what in fact they have eaten during school hours? In her PhD thesis Nina Lyng explored methods to evaluate school children’s replies and pointed to possibilities for further developing exact methods.
Phantom food items on the plate
The studies showed how gender, data collection method and lunch format influenced the accuracy of 11-year-old school children’s replies when they themselves were asked to report what they had consumed.
Amongst others, it turned out that some school children reported that they had eaten food items which were not on their plate, so-called phantom food items. This reporting of phantom food items led the project to investigate further which food items they reported correctly, which food items they forgot to report and which food items they “made up” in their reporting.
Girls more accurate in their reporting than boys
In addition, the studies showed that school children reported packed lunch consumption more accurately than consumption of the school meal they were served. Furthermore it turned out that girls were more accurate in their reporting than boys, so gender differences should be included in future studies of what school children eat.
The studies were undertaken amongst 5th grade students at three public schools in Copenhagen. They participated for two days – on the first day they reported what they ate of the packed lunch, on the second day they reported what they ate of a self-selected meal from the school lunch arrangement.
The results from the project indicate that further development of methods should take into account gender and data collection method. Furthermore, the results indicate that the methods can be applied advantageously to evaluate consumption of meals outside school, and that the methods are suitable for other target groups than school children.
Read more
Read the Danish summary of Nina Lyng’s PhD thesis: Accuracy of 11-year-olds selfreported school lunch consumption (pdf).
When the articles in the thesis have been published the entire thesis will become available on www.food.dtu.dk. Please send an e-mail to food@food.dtu.dk, if you want to be notified when this happens.