Slim by Design for Schools

Brian Wansink is well known as an expert on food environments, and a main component of his work has focused on school food. In his newly released book, Slim by Design, ¹ Dr. Wansink discusses “mindless eating solutions” that any school can take on to encourage healthier food choices by students—all at basically no cost. And schools in the United States are catching on: To date, more than 20,000 schools have incorporated the ideas behind Dr. Wansink's Smarter Lunchroom initiative.

Why do you think the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement has been so successful? And why have the past few years seen such an uptick in schools embracing this movement?

Dr. Wansink: I think there are a couple of things going on to influence this. To start, all of the changes suggested through Smarter Lunchrooms are low cost/no cost. Nothing there costs more than $50 to do. So the age-old excuse that, “We do not have a budget for it,” cannot be used anymore. Introducing small changes that can be made, many of them, overnight or over a weekend, make them easier to embrace.

Second, we do talk about the food, of course, but we do not tell schools to get rid of certain foods or to serve more of other foods. We ask schools to identify what they want kids eating more of, whether it is fruits or vegetables or a target entrée, and we can tell them what to do to make that happen. That has really resonated with a lot of food service staff. We are not telling them how to do their job; we are just helping them to be even more effective at their job.

Another reason so many schools have been adopting the Smarter Lunchrooms initiative has been because the USDA has encouraged the use of it in their HealthierUS School Challenge. And some state departments of education and state departments of health are also now encouraging schools to use this as a way to check whether they are helping make their kids fat by design or slim by design. The 100-point scorecard is highly reliable and its output is a single number; it is very motivating to schools because they can see that maybe they have a score of 45, and if they make just a few more changes, they can get to a 51 by Monday.

The scorecard could be a type of a ranking system in itself, correct?

Dr. Wansink: We have an app that is being introduced right now called the SLM Scorecard. It enables food service directors to score their school on their mobile devices. It also has a feature that allows parents to score schools and a feature that allows students to score their schools. We think that getting enough different people doing this is going to put some healthy encouragement, not pressure, on some of the more recalcitrant schools that have not yet adopted these changes.

How are you tracking the influence of the Smarter Lunchrooms initiatives?

Dr. Wansink: Initially, every year we contact a sample of about 8000 schools throughout the nation. We ask them about their efforts, what changes they've made, what is working best for them, what changes they've seen in different kids. So we objectively do that. We did the first one last year, and we are going to be doing the second one in a few months.

In addition to that, when people score themselves, they can elect to send their information to us. They can add their information, which then populates a map, or they can elect to keep it private. Right now, we are setting up this new app to do all of these different things. We are not sure what is going to happen, but we really hope that a lot of these people want to make the information public. That can be the comparison that encourages people.

There is an example in Slim by Design where you describe a group of schools that you all recommended a small change to—about displaying fruit in the lunch line. It seemed that the majority wanted to do it, but then a few of them balked and said, ‘No, we cannot do that.’ How do you overcome those types of barriers to change?

Dr. Wansink: That is exactly right. I believe we had six schools in that example and three of them did the change, two of them said they were not going to do it because it was not going to work, and one of them did it wrong. But then, the one that did it wrong, theirs worked even better.

What we find is that food service directors are just like any other profession, in that if you look at any profession, whether it is food service directors, fast food employees, attorneys, whatever, there are about 40% that are really ambitious, really creative, and they are always trying to do whatever they can to get that last bit of performance done. Then there is another 20% who are just the opposite. They do not want to change anything. This is true with professors, attorneys, restaurant owners, pretty much anything.

Then there is that middle 60%. They would like things to be better, but they are a little bit risk averse. They are a little bit ambitious, but not overly ambitious. They are kind of cautious. But if they see something work elsewhere, they will try it.

And I think what we find in food service directors is that those early 20,000, they are some of the early adopters. They are the ambitious ones. They are the aggressive ones. The last 20%, I do not think will ever achieve excellence. But that is fine.

That is one reason we have the viral nature of this app building and why we are encouraging other people to rate it. A food service director may not want to make any changes, but if the helicopter parents and the local PTA are saying, “Why do you not do something,” and the kids are saying, “Why do you not do something,” then they may have less of a choice than they want.

There is a student component with the Student Nutrition Action Committee (SNAC). Are you finding that kids are interested in being involved in this kind of thing?

Dr. Wansink: The thing is you do not need a majority of the kids to be interested in it at the school to be on those committees. All you need are those sort of resume-building, food-loving, or nutrition-loving people. You can find them anywhere. They are pretty much everybody who populates my lab, actually, once those people go to college they are the people in my lab.

Do you have any examples to illustrate how some of these changes play out in schools?

Dr. Wansink: I was at a conference a few months ago in Traverse City, Michigan, and after my talk was over, I was chatting with people in the lobby and there was someone who came up to me and said, “All I did in my cafeteria was put all the white milk in the front of the coolers and sales of white milk went up 40%, overnight.” We hear a lot about small changes that people make targeted toward one item, but when they hear those numbers change, they become believers about everything else.

One of the core values of Smarter Lunchrooms is sustainability. Could you explain further how this initiative is sustainable over time?

Dr. Wansink: Yes, we look at the sustainability of using this approach: if it is being used, not just implemented one year, but being implemented on a continuous basis.

That is one of the reasons we send over a scorecard. We find that schools can very easily backslide, and filling out the scorecard on a recurring basis tells you whether you have backslid or whether things are still in good shape.

The other way we look at sustainability is in terms of reducing food waste. And a lot of the elements of what we do end up naturally doing that. If you entice students to take, let us say, peas because you call them “power peas,” a higher percentage of the kids are likely to eat more of them than if you instead make them take the peas against their will.

In Slim by Design, you cover ideas for homes, grocery stores, workplaces, and restaurants, along with schools. Do you see a crossover of changes happening between these places?

Dr. Wansink: Yes, absolutely. Where we see a lot of transfer over is in the approaches for school lunches and with the way parents can feed their kids. All of the principles in chapter 6 (Smarter Lunchrooms, p. 185) end up being relevant to the way we feed kids at home. Once you find out about things, like simply naming vegetables can change the way kids eat them, it is easy to do this at home as well. We name all of our vegetables at home, I tell a story about them, and then they eat them well.

I think one cool thing that could be appropriated that we find that people use is in chapter 3 (Restaurant Dining by Design, p. 65), when I talk about “What Would Batman Eat?” There is a little sidebar that is called “What Would Batman Eat,” and I talk about this study we did with Head Start kids where we go to fast food restaurants and we say, “Do you want French fries or do you want apple slices with your sandwich?” Most little kids say they want French fries. Yet, if you say, “Hey, which do you think are healthier, apple slices or French fries?”, they will answer with “apple slices,” but they will still want French fries.

As soon as you get them to step out of their own frame of reference for a second and think of how somebody else might consider this choice, it really causes them to reset what they say and what they choose. So one of the things we would do is we would say, “Hey, what do you think your teacher would choose, apple slices or French fries? Okay, what do you want, apple slices or French fries?”

Then, we would use superheroes, like, “What do you think Batman would eat, apple slices or French fries?” before asking them, “What do you want to eat?” We find that simply asking them to answer for somebody else, regardless of what their answer is, led about half the people about half the time to order apple slices.

And we find that day care people as well as some people in food service are using this new approach. It is amazing how effective it is.

Could these tools be used by health professionals or clinicians?

Dr. Wansink: The nice thing about a lot of these techniques is they are just simple rules of thumb or pieces of advice that they can give parents to use at home. I would say almost everything that we learn in school, almost everybody in our lab uses with their kids at home.

What is your vision for Slim by Design for schools?

Dr. Wansink: The idea for this whole thing is to become a movement and a movement that ends up reaching all kids. It is a lot easier in cafeterias for people to be slim by design than to be slim by education or slim by willpower or slim by legislation. Slim by design works a whole lot better. It is a lot easier and it can be done overnight. Best of all, it is low cost/no cost.