Increasing Children's Fruit and Vegetable Consumption Through Changing the Home Food Environment

The Background

Poor diet is one of the leading contributors to chronic disease.

Despite national dietary guidelines, 96% of Australian children do not consume the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables. Dietary habits established in childhood often persist into adulthood, making early intervention critical for improving lifelong health outcomes.

The Problem

Many healthy eating interventions for children focus on providing nutrition education directly to kids. However, parents play a central role in shaping the home food environment and influencing children's eating behaviours.

The challenge was to develop an effective intervention that could improve children's diets while remaining feasible, affordable and scalable for population-wide delivery.

What Worked

In response, we developed Healthy Habits, a brief telephone-based intervention that supported parents to make practical changes to the home food environment and encourage healthy eating behaviours.

Delivered through just four telephone calls, Healthy Habits was the first scalable intervention of its kind.

The Result

Healthy Habits successfully increased children's fruit and vegetable consumption, with improvements maintained from 2 months to 5 years after the intervention. The program also improved parents' diets, increasing fruit and vegetable intake by up to one serve per day over 18 months.

The evidence generated by the Healthy Habits program informed policy and practice. The intervention was included in the NSW Obesity Prevention Strategy (2013–2018) and was subsequently adapted for large-scale implementation through the Time for Healthy Habits trial across five NSW Local Health Districts.

The implementation trial demonstrated that Healthy Habits could be successfully delivered at scale, increasing parents' vegetable consumption and improving aspects of children's dietary quality. Together, these findings show that brief, parent-focused support to make small changes to the home food environment can produce meaningful and sustained improvements in family eating behaviours while remaining practical for population-wide delivery.