Reply to 'evaluation of the food dudes programme by Upton et al.'

Madam. We read with interest the Letter to the Editor regarding our paper ‘Increasing children's lunchtime consumption of fruit and vegetables: an evaluation of the Food Dudes programme’, which was recently published in Public Health Nutrition. It would seem that since the evaluation was conducted, a number of positive developments have occurred including the introduction of the Food Dudes Forever phase and the Choice Architecture for School Catering scheme. We hope that our evaluation had some part to play in these positive developments. The correspondent suggests, and we agree, that while school catering practices are required to adhere to specific nutritional guidelines, these often do not encourage children to make healthy choices. Indeed, children are often presented with a variety of energy-dense foods at lunchtime. As we note in our paper, the development of an environment that promotes healthy eating is crucial to the success of interventions that aim to change children's eating behaviours and the Choice Architecture for School Catering scheme would appear to be a positive step towards achieving this. The Food Dudes Forever phase and the Choice Architecture for School Catering scheme are encouraging, but we obviously could not evaluate aspects of the programme that were not in existence when the evaluation was conducted.