Reducing the Cost of Implementing the F.I.T. Game Healthy Eating Program in Diverse Schools While Observing Effects on Food Waste

It is well known that children do not eat enough fruits and vegetables. The FIT Game Healthy Eating Program is an interactive, story-board type narrative that has increased fruit and vegetable consumption in elementary school children. While The FIT Game intervention has shown progress in the past, the schools studied had minimal diversity and the intervention was time intensive and costly. This research utilized The FIT Game intervention in four Salt Lake City area, Title 1, schools with a large amount of student diversity. The first portion of research was conducted in two phases. The first phase compared an intervention school, with the FIT Game program being implemented, to a control school without the intervention. The first phase resulted in increases in both fruit and vegetable consumption in the intervention school, while the control school had less consumption. Phase two looked at conducting The FIT Game in the two remaining schools, but the narrative was already determined and did not advance based on the schools' consumption. Both schools showed improved fruit and vegetable consumption. However, because of the way data was collected, further studies need to be done to ensure that the increase is due to The FIT Game. The second portion of research looked at how fruit and vegetable waste changes when programs like The FIT Game are implemented in schools. The same schools as the first portion of research were used for this as well. The results showed that even though that when fruit and vegetable consumption increase, the waste typically decreases, there is sometimes an overlooked compromise. In one school, while the vegetable consumption improved, the fruit consumption decreased while the fruit waste increased. At first glance, while the vegetable increase is promising, when you look at the weight of the food consumed compared to the increase of fruit wasted, the amount of fruit wasted weighs 6 times more.