If you want kids to eat healthier snacks promote them in a manga magazine (a type of comic book), that was the message from a paper published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior in January.
The researchers gave 57 children with a mean age of approx. 10 either a manga comic book promoting healthy eating called “Fight for Your Right to Fruit” or a non health related newsletter to read. After some time, the children were offered a choice of snacks and the children who read the fruit promoting comic were more likely to choose the healthy option, nice to know advertising can work for healthy foods too.
The authors suggest that comics could be used a media to promote healthy eating. So just two questions remain, where can we get the comic and can they make a sequel about vegetables?
The paper was published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.