Cereal bars with spinach mixed in or veggie-infused tater tots are great at fooling children into eating greens or broccoli or carrots. But experts say that aside from the fact that these products often use only traces of vegetables, this strategy assumes the children can’t like kale or broccoli itself, and relying on such products makes it far more likely that they won’t.
“If kids are not given the opportunity to actually experience the vegetable — how it looks, its taste, its texture — then they aren’t getting a chance to ‘train their taste buds,’” said Dr. Natalie Muth, a pediatrician in Carlsbad, Calif., and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “The goal in raising healthy eaters is to help them learn to like and prefer healthy foods.”
To do that requires first knowing what the healthy foods look and taste like.
“A lot of parents feed their kids what food companies are telling them is kid food, and not realizing those food choices may be impacting their kids’ health,” said Dr. Nimali Fernando, a pediatrician in Virginia and founder of the nonprofit Doctor Yum Project. In addition to childhood obesity, effects may include gastrointestinal issues, behavioral challenges and other health problems she associates with poor eating habits. “There’s all these ripple effects from the average American kid-friendly diet that are very challenging as a pediatrician to deal with, because it’s so pervasive.”
Among commercially available brands, she favors one called Fresh Bellies, which sells purées of fruits and “unmasked veggies.” The fruit and vegetable lines are distinct from one another, rather than blended as fruit-vegetable combinations, which is what most pouch and puréed food brands offer.
By mixing the two, the company’s founder and chief executive Saskia Sorrosa said, “kids are never learning to eat vegetables. They’re learning to eat fruit sugars.”
Infancy and early toddlerhood are when children are most open to learning new flavors, making this stage of development a critical window for introducing a wide variety of flavors — including or perhaps especially the earthy or bitter tastes associated with vegetables that many parents assume children won’t like. Missing this critical window makes it much harder to accept healthy foods later, but not impossible, and continued exposure or even first-time introductions are important for older children too, since they are forming what are likely to become eating habits for life.
That doesn’t mean any of this is easy. Kids often are naturally drawn to what’s familiar and are reluctant or fearful of trying new things, and that includes food. But if children get to experience a food again and again — even if it’s just seeing or feeling it — the food becomes more familiar, and that may mean they are more willing to eat or at least try it.
“It starts to make it so these foods are not new anymore,” said Stephanie Anzman-Frasca, a pediatric and behavioral medicine specialist at the University at Buffalo. “If they’re experiencing these more ‘stealth’ vegetables, they miss out on the exposures that help them get over this very normal reluctance to try something new.”
Simply introducing new foods repeatedly can help children become willing to taste them. That doesn’t guarantee they’ll like them, but it can go a long way. Following are some strategies experts recommend.
Eat Dinner Together
Children who eat family dinners regularly, where the atmosphere is positive and engaging, tend to not only consume more fruits and vegetables, fewer fried foods and soda, but also — perhaps unsurprisingly — to be in better physical and mental health years later.
When families provide an alternative meal for a child, “then he’s learning, ‘If I don’t eat that, then I’ll eat something tastier,’” Dr. Fernando said. “But if we don’t cater to that, they will end up eating the food that we put in front of them.”
Expanding a child’s palate takes time — but they’re not going to starve in the meantime. Often, kids don’t need to eat as much as a parent might think, she said. “Kids are pretty good at knowing how much food they need to eat in order to grow. The best thing we can do as parents is offer a variety of foods on a regular basis.”
Providing a few dishes that everyone at the table can choose from — it can be as simple as bowls of cherry tomatoes or chopped carrots — will allow children to make choices about what they do and don’t want to eat, without being taught that they need a separate kids’ meal.
Don’t Spoil Their Appetites
To be open to trying new foods, children need to be coming to the table hungry. “We often don’t let toddlers get hungry enough,” Dr. Fernando said. “We’re ready with a Ziploc bag at all moments — if they’re crying, if they scrape their knee.”
That makes it harder for them to enjoy dinner, because they’re not actually hungry. If parents substitute more palatable kid-friendly options, children may eat something because it tastes good and not because their bodies are telling them to eat.
Let Children Play With Food
Melanie Potock, a pediatric feeding specialist in Longmont, Colo., and co-author with Dr. Fernando of “Raising a Healthy, Happy Eater: A Parent’s Handbook,” emphasizes that exposure and even acceptance don’t necessarily mean eating. She suggested letting children use squash cubes as building blocks; slicing a beet open and letting kids “tattoo” themselves with it or use asparagus spears as paint brushes (use juice as paint or just pretend to paint with water). Wash the food when they finish and you can still cook with it so you’re not wasting good food.
Over time, this helps make the food less foreign. “That moves the needle closer to tasting it and enjoying it,” said Dr. Fernando.
Pairing a new food with one the child already likes is another strategy. Serve vegetables with a favorite dip, or put peppers into an already-popular dish, and eventually the child may like the pepper on its own.
Enlist Kids as Kitchen Helpers
Letting children help in the kitchen can also go a long way to opening their minds to food. If a child helps to prepare carrots for roasting, and then arranges them for serving, Ms. Potock said, it’s an exciting experience. “When kids carry that platter to the table, they’re really proud of it. Part of the exploration is making sure other people in the room comment on what they were able to do well,” she said — complimenting the layout, perhaps, or how pretty the carrots or the herb garnish is. “And not, ‘Oh, you’re going to eat carrots now?’ We want to celebrate what the kids can do, and then those kids will always try to do more.”
