The project

The Smart-Snack project is basically developed in schools.

A group of technicians made up by psychologists, nurses and teachers go to the participating schools in several phases at the beginning and end of the intervention.

Neuropsychological evaluation

The field technicians’ team install up to 17 laptops in a room of each school, usually in the library. By groups, the participants make an hour of Neuropsychological tests which evaluate memory, attention, reasoning, emotion recognition and right decision-making (through a betting game). Measures of weight and size of each participant were taken.

Second visit

During the second visit, a group of nurses visited each centre in order to take samples of blood and urine of participants. They also measured the blood pressure and diameter of the participants’ waist.

Third visit

Usually, the last day on the second visit a draw was made in order to determine which team would each participant be assigned to. Team 1: seasonal fruit; or team 2: seasonal fruit + nuts. On a third visit, instructions were partitioned for proper monitoring of the intervention and bags of nuts were given to Team 2.

3 months later…

The team of technicians returns to the school centre to keep track of how you they are doing with the intervention and to distribute more bags of nuts to Team 2.

All these evaluations are made twice, one at the beginning and another one at the end of the 6 months’ intervention. We are interested in assessing whether there has been an improvement in the tests’ results since the initial/baseline evaluation.

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