Providing choice increases children's vegetable intake Rohlfs Domínguez, Paloma Gámiz Ruiz, Fernando Gil, Marta Moreno, Hayarelis Márquez Zamora, Raúl Gallo Torre, Milagros Brugada Sauras, Isabel de Children Choice School Intervention Vegetables Consumption This work has been partially supported by the pre-doctoral fellowship of Junta de Andalucía, grant HUM-02763 (Junta de Andalucía, Spain) and PSI2011-23702; PSI2012-31641 (MINECO, Spain). One hundred and fifty children between 4 and 6 years old were studied to examine the effect of providing them with a choice of vegetables on their vegetable consumption. Offering vegetable choice was expected to increase the children’s vegetable intake due to increased personal autonomy. The option for the children to choose the vegetables to ingest was varied across three different conditions. Within the discrete choice condition (DCC), children could choose the target vegetable at the beginning of the meal; within the continued discrete choice plus variety condition (CDCP), children were exposed to a variety of vegetables (zucchini and green beans), so that they could choose the target vegetable whenever they made a bite during the whole meal. Within the no-choice condition (NCC), children were alternately exposed to only one kind of vegetable, so that no choice possibility was provided. The choice conditions (CDCP and DCC) were associated with higher vegetable intake, in comparison to the no-choice control condition (NCC). No significant differences were found between the DCC and the CDCP regarding participants’ total vegetable intake. These results demonstrate the enhancing effect of providing choice to increase vegetable intake in young children. A higher degree of personal control and consequent level of intrinsic motivation is hypothesized to underlie the effect of choice availability. 2024-01-23T09:15:40Z 2024-01-23T09:15:40Z 2013 journal article Published version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2013.05.006 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/87131 10.1016/j.foodqual.2013.05.006 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Elsevier