Keep The Veggies Coming

US News and World Report December 2007

Keep The Veggies Coming
By Nancy Shute

This article hits it right on the mark when it comes to children developing healthy eating habits from infancy.

Remember the old saying, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, no pun intended.

When it comes to food, smoking, drinking, sports like fishing, tennis and on and on. Monkey see, monkey do. Well that certainly holds true for eating.

On my website, www.infinitehealthresources.com, The Resource Center, I have written hundreds of thousands of words related to this topic. I am no expert, however I have been blessed with 4 healthy children and they have been eating healthy veggy filled meals since solid foods were introduced into their lives. Here’s the secret. Shut up, sit down and eat. They will too. Talk to your spouse about how good this food is in front of your child. How good this food makes you feel. They will eat.

Now if your diet is hamburgers and fries or mac and cheese, you’re screwed. Period.

Read on and hear from the experts:

Want your kids to eat their veggies? Start offering them when they’re tiny babies, and don’t take a grimace to mean “No.”
That’s the advice of Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist and expert on food choices at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. She recently had 45 mothers spoon-feed their babies pureed green beans once daily. Half the group also offered pureed peaches afterwards. At first, the babies who got peaches ate more peaches then beans; after eight days, both groups were eating green beans and had increased their consumption twofold. “They’ll wrinkle their noses,” Mennella says, “but they still continue to eat.”
The babies who were breast-fed also ate more peaches than formula-fed babies, perhaps because their mothers ate more fruit than non-breast-feeding moms. This echoes Mennella’s earlier research, in which babies born to women who drank carrot juice in the third trimester favored cereal made with carrot juice, as did babies whose mothers drank carrot juice while breast-feeding. “It’s really a fundamental feature of all mammals,” Mennella says. “It’s the first way we learn about foods and flavors.”
Sweets please. It’s clear that children favor what their parents eat, whether it’s muktuk in Alaska or dal in New Delhi. When it comes to eating vegetables, that’s a problem, since most adults don’t eat the recommended two servings of fruit and three servings of vegetables daily.All humans relish fat and sugar, because they’re the most concentrated sources of energy in a world where, until very recently, hunger and famine were threats to almost everyone. Now, alas, it’s easy to supersize the fats and carbs, and still hard to choose celery over cookies. Nutritionists are well aware that parents aren’t always the best role models when it comes to healthful eating, and schools have lately tried to do a better job of encouraging wise choices, by putting water in vending machines and fresh fruit in the lunch line. Congress is now considering a federal ban on the sale of candy, sodas, and salty fatty food in school vending machines and cafeterias.
The eat-your-vegetables war has escalated recently, fueled by two new books that encourage parents to sneak vegetables into treats like brownies and chocolate pudding. Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld (wife of the comedian Jerry) and The Sneaky Chef by Missy Chase Lapine have evoked howls from chefs and nutritionists for suggesting that slipping pureed cauliflower into macaroni and cheese is a good idea. There are two big problems here. One, this sends kids the message that brownies are sustenance, not an occasional treat. And two, it never gives children the chance to learn to appreciate vegetables for their own merit.
“You can’t mask the flavor if the goal is to get kids to eat fruits and vegetables,” Mennella argues. All the research points to this common-sense realization: the earlier and broader a child’s experience with a wide variety of foods, the more healthful the diet. A new book, Food Flights by peditricians Laura Jana and Jennifer Shu, offers practical strategies that are much more appealing than vegetable subterfuge – like requiring a “no (more), thank you” bite to audition to new foods.
I, too, depair when the lunch bag comes home at the end of the day with carrots and apple unmunched. But I also have discovered that Mennella’s theory works too. If I ooh and ah over the deliciousness of spinach salad, my preschooler will smack her lips as she pops leaves into her mouth. She still thinks a Chicken Mcnugget is a culinary marvel, alas. But she also now takes joy in green things that crunch.


Learn more about healthy diets and great references at www.infinitehelathresources.com, click on The Resource Center.