The "Fruit Heroes" project, promoted by the Portuguese Association Against Childhood Obesity, managed to significantly increase the daily consumption of fruit and vegetables in schools in the districts of Lisbon and Santarém. The data are contained in the monitoring report for the 2024/2025 school year, conducted by the Institute of Environmental Health at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon. Nationally, the initiative involved 11,174 children aged three to 11, distributed across 578 classes in 308 educational establishments.
In the district of Lisbon, the percentage of children who consumed fruit or vegetables daily at school went from 74.9% at the beginning of the intervention to 90.2% in the fifth week, an increase of 15.3 percentage points. In Santarém, the growth was from 85.4% to 95.2%. Improvements were also recorded in snacks taken to school: in Lisbon, the proportion of children with healthy snacks increased from 64.9% to 81.3%, while in Santarém it went from 67.2% to 77.2%.
The program takes place in a school setting for five weeks and encourages the consumption of fruit and vegetables through playful-pedagogical stories, games and challenges. More than half of the children in both districts tried at least one fruit or vegetable they had never tasted, with 52.4% of children in Lisbon and 52.3% in Santarém expanding their food knowledge in this way.
