Eat Your Child's Food! It Will Make Them Like It Better

By Julia Moravcsik, PhD, author of Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food

This article is about a strange technique for getting your young child to like a food.  To make your child like her food, you should eat it yourself!

I'm not talking about eating the same KIND of food.  I'm talking about eating the actual food off their plates!

There are two versions of this technique. 

The Tricky "I Want Your Food" Technique

Imagine that you've served your toddler a healthy meal of vegetable frittata and grapes.  Your toddler eats the frittata, but leaves the grapes.  You're not surprised -- you know that your little sweetums is not a grape lover.

"Oh, YES!" you say, using your best acting skills.  "I'm so glad you didn't eat your grapes because I LOVE grapes!"

Grab her plate and wolf down the grapes, making suitable relishing noises.

If your child is like most children, this will tell her 2 things:

1. Grapes are tasty because Mom (or Dad) is loving them.
2. Someone has taken my grapes away and is enjoying them.  I WANT THEM BACK!

Children have a paradoxical desire to like things that other people take from them, even if they hated them a second ago.  Heaven help the parent who, within the sight of their child, throws away a cheap toy that their child no longer plays with.  Immediately it becomes the favorite toy!

Use this technique sparingly, and only for young children who aren't sophisticated enough to catch on that you're only pretending.

The Loving "We're Sharing This Food" Technique

Children have a natural instinct to eat the same foods as their parents.  You can see this same instinct in many mammals.  A young fawn will push its mother's nose aside and eat the same plants that its mothers was eating.

You can (and should) encourage this instinct by eating the same foods as your child.

However, to really take advantage of this instinct, eat from the same plate as your baby or toddler.  Share a plate of food with your child.  You can sit your child in your lap so she can see the food. Your child's brain will definitely get the message that you and she are eating the same food!

Sharing a plate is a cozy, comfy, and fun thing to do.  Your child will associate the taste of grapes with the warmth of your lap, and will like them more as a result.

Our Primitive Ancestors Shared Their Food

People a long time ago (and today in some cultures) ate from the same plates.  It is a time-honored way of teaching children to eat the same food as the rest of the tribe or family.  It added motivation to eat in the form of mild competition (if I don't eat this then brother will get it) and role modeling.

What About Germs?

You may be concerned that sharing plates will spread germs.  This is a valid concern.  Young children can catch dangerous germs from their parents, including those that cause cavities.

With a little care, you can share a plate and still avoid spreading germs.  Avoid touching your mouth if you're eating finger food.  If you're eating spoon food, use a different spoon for you and for baby, and spoon from different parts of the plate.

What About Table Manners?

You may be concerned that your child will learn bad table manners. You don't want your child grabbing food off Grandma's plate at Thanksgiving!

This technique is for babies and toddlers.  You have plenty of time to stop before your child gets old enough to be expected to have table manners.  Don't worry about manners, mess, or mayhem this early in your child's life.  The important thing is to have fun and teach the taste of healthy foods!

Would you like a simple, easy-to-follow program that will teach your child to love healthy food? See my new book Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food on amazon.com.

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Using High Antioxidant Sweeteners for Baking

By Julia Moravcsik, PhD, author of Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food

Sugar, as everyone knows, is a source of empty calories.  That means that it has no nutrition other than calories -- no vitamins, minerals, or protein.

Sugar also has practically no antioxidants.  A high antioxidant diet may prevent asthma, cancer, diabetes, and maybe even diseases like autism or inflammatory bowel disease. 

Some alternative sweeteners are extremely high in antioxidants.  If you substitute these sweeteners for sugar, your muffin or bread will be much higher in antioxidants.

Before I begin, I want to begin this article with 2 warnings. 

No Sweeter Than Fruit
Sweet tastes will make your child crave more sweet foods.  It will also make healthy foods like vegetables less appealing.

Only use sweeteners as a minor ingredient in otherwise healthy foods.  A rule of thumb is that the baked item should taste no sweeter than fruit.  Fresh fruit should be the sweetest thing that your child eats.  Otherwise, the threshold for what she considers sweet will start to go up, and mildly sweet foods like carrots won't taste sweet enough.

Most recipes will taste just as good if you cut the amount of sweetener in half, or even by two-thirds.  Sugar usually doesn't affect the chemistry of baking.  Don't reduce the amount of sweetener in yeasted breads because the sweetener is used by the yeast as a food source.

Not for Babies
Even mildly sweet tastes may teach your baby to like sweeter foods later on.  Wait until your baby is 2 years old or more before feeding her even mildly sweet baked goods.

Syrupy sweeteners, like honey, molasses, barley malt syrup, maple syrup, or brown rice syrup shouldn't be given to babies because of the risk of botulism.  Toddlers have a well-developed immune system so syrupy sweeteners won't be a problem for them.

High Antioxidant Sweeteners

These sweeteners are extremely high in antioxidants:

• Blackstrap molasses
• Dark molasses
• Barley malt syrup
• Date sugar
• Buckwheat honey

(For a complete list, see this article)

 Blackstrap and Dark Molasses
These sweeteners can be substituted for any recipe that calls for honey.  To substitute for sugar, follow these guidelines for honey. 

Molasses has a very strong taste -- wonderful, but strong.  You may want to combine it with a milder sweetener to cut its taste.

It has approximately 400 times the antioxidant value of sugar.

Barley Malt Syrup
This sweetener has a pleasant malty taste.  It may be difficult to find, but you can find it at Whole Foods or other natural food stores.  It can also be purchased online. 

It has approximately 200 times the antioxidant value of sugar.

Date Sugar
Date sugar is dried, ground up dates.  It is mild and pleasant tasting.  It does not taste extremely sweet so you may need to add more of it than you would the syrup sweeteners.

You can find date sugar in natural food stores or international food stores, as well as online.

It has approximately 400 times the antioxidant value of sugar.

Buckwheat Honey
The antioxidant value of honey can vary widely depending on what plant it was made from. Buckwheat honey has the highest antioxidant value of any standard honey.

Buckwheat honey is a strong, but pleasant-tasting honey.  Its flavor may overpower a recipe, so make sure the other ingredients have strong flavors as well.

Buckwheat honey has been found to increase the antioxidant value of plasma, which shows that the antioxidants are absorbed into the bloodstream.  This is important, as some high-antioxidant chemicals aren't easily absorbed.

Buckwheat honey, like all honey, can also help fight viruses and bacteria.

Other Ingredients Should Be Healthy

The other ingredients in a muffin or bread also contribute to the antioxidant value.  Whole grain flours are much higher in antioxidants than refined flours.  You can substitute some buckwheat flour, which is extremely high in antioxidants like rutin.

Add grated vegetables like carrots and zucchini or mashed vegetables like sweet potato or pumpkin to the baked product.

Learning to Like Healthy Sweeteners

Healthy, high-antioxidant sweeteners tend to have their own tastes -- ranging from medium to strong.  Refined sugar is used by manufacturers because it has no taste of its own.

If you teach your child to like these healthy sweeteners by giving them to her when she's young, she will love them for the rest of her life.

Would you like a simple, easy-to-follow program that will teach your child to love healthy food? See my new book Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food on amazon.com.

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Smelling Healthy Foods Makes Your Child Like Them Better

By Julia Moravcsik, PhD, author of Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food

The smell of food is part of its flavor. If you want to teach your child to like the taste of healthy food, you will need to give her lots of "lessons" in the taste of healthy food.

One way to do this is to let her smell food. Smelling food is safe -- she doesn't actually have to TRY it! It also gets her accustomed to the taste of healthy foods. If your child sniffs guavas a few times, she may find them less strange when she actually gives them a taste.

Children often need a dozen or more "lessons" in a food before they come to like it. Smelling is an easy and painless lesson.

Sniffing Healthy Food Makes Processed Food Seem Boring

Processed foods have very little flavor.  They may taste salty, sweet, or fatty, but they don't have the fresh, strong flavors of real food. 

If you teach your child to like the tastes of fresh food, he will shun the nasty, insipid tastes of processed foods.  The artificial flavors, stale flour, and procesing chemicals will taste repulsive to him. 

The most straightforward way to teach your child to like healthy flavors is to give your child home-made foods made with fresh ingredients.  However, you can also help your child learn this lesson by letting him smell fresh ingredients.

Sniffing at the Supermarket

When you're at the supermarket, let your little tyke smell the food that you're putting in the grocery cart.  You can pick up a basket of strawberries and smell them yourself, and then say "Ummm, tasty strawberries!"  Then give them to your child to smell.

Sniffing Makes Food Fun

There are a few other advantages to letting your child smell food.  First, it makes food into a fun, playful toy.  Your mom may have told you not to play with your food, but playing with food is a wonderful way for children to overcome their misgivings about it. 

Sniffing Makes Children Pay Attention to Food and Its Tastes

Playing the smell game also teaches your child to pay attention to his senses.  Many people wolf down their meals without even really paying attention to them.  Your goal is to create a young foodie out of your child -- he should love healthy, fresh, wonderful-tasting food, and dislike the bland, artificial flavors of processed food.  Teaching him to pay attention to his senses of smell and taste will help him along in this goal.

Would you like a simple, easy-to-follow program that will teach your child to love healthy food? See my new book Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food on amazon.com.

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Hiding Healthy Food in Your Kid's Dishes: How to Do It, How Not to Do It

By Julia Moravcsik, PhD, author of Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food

There are several popular books, like The Sneaky Chef, which tell you how to hide healthy foods in your child's favorite dishes. Desperate parents resort to doing this because they can't get their children to eat healthy foods like vegetables. If their child won't eat anything but chocolate chip cookies and bologna, then at least if they hide spinach in the chocolate chip cookies, their child is getting SOME vegetables.

It's the strategy of a desperate parent, but it ultimately fails. Here are some of the problems with hiding healthy foods in unhealthy junk-food dishes.

Kids don't learn to like the taste of the food. If the healthy food is hidden so well that it can't be tasted, then your child will never learn to like the taste of the food. Young children often have to taste a food 12 - 15 times in order to like it. If spinach is hidden in chocolate cake, your child could eat the cake a hundred times and still not learn to like spinach.

The caloric content skyrockets. Most healthy foods are low in calories. If you hide 50 calories of spinach (a child-size serving) in 300 calories of chocolate cake, the nutrition of the spinach has to be spread out over 350 calories. What was a vitamin, mineral, and phytonutrient dense food is now diluted by the empty calories. It becomes, at best, a moderately healthy food.

Your child is learning to like the taste of junk food. If your child eats chocolate cake often, she will learn to love chocolate cake. As far as your child's taste preference education goes, you are teaching her to love chocolate cake, not spinach. She may be getting a tiny bit of extra nutrition now, but when she's an adult, she'll reach for a slice of chocolate cake because it is "comfort food" from her childhood.

How to Hide Food and Make It Work

You can still use the Sneaky Chef strategy, if you use it wisely. If you add a food to a dish that your child loves, it will make her accept it more.

Here's how to SUCCESSFULLY hide unfamiliar or disliked foods in your child's food.

No Junk Food. Only "hide" food in nutritious dishes. Make a vow to feed your child unnutritious dishes very rarely -- perhaps once a month.

Use Your Child's Favorite Healthy Dishes. Do make sure that the dishes are ones that your child loves. Whole wheat spaghetti with tomato sauce may be a favorite of your child. Sneak some finely chopped spinach or broccoli in the tomato sauce.

Let the Flavor Stand Out. Make sure your child can taste the flavor of the healthy food. It doesn't have to stand out, but your child should have at least an unconscious awareness of the taste. Your goal is to make the taste of the healthy food familiar to your child, because children like familiar foods better.

After a Few Hides, Let Your Child Taste the Food on Her Own. Don't always hide the healthy food in dishes. Once you have "snuck" the food into your child's favorite dish a few times, present the food on its own, or as the main ingredient of a dish. Your child may now like the food because it has a familiar taste.

When it's successfully done, "hiding" food means gradually introducing it to your child, in a way that she will accept. It doesn't mean "fortifying" your child's junk food with a few tablespoons of vegetables.

Would you like a simple, easy-to-follow program that will teach your child to love healthy food? See my new book Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food on amazon.com.

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Feeding Your Child Healthy Food Now Can Help Him Years Later

By Julia Moravcsik, PhD, author of Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food

Wendy Oddy and her colleagues at Perth's Telethon Institute for Child Health Research have done some interesting studies finding that children who are fed healthy food have lower rates of anxiety and ADHD when they become teenagers.

I'm concentrating this blog on HOW to teach children the taste of healthy foods, not WHY they should eat healthy foods. But sometimes, when your child seems to be taking weeks to learn to like Brussels sprouts, or your mother-in-law is insisting that your kids eat sweets because it will "give them energy to grow", it's nice to know that the effort you are making today may make a huge difference in your child's life later on.

Keep with it!

Would you like a simple, easy-to-follow program that will teach your child to love healthy food? See my new book Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food on amazon.com.

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Teach Your Child to Like the Taste of Fresh Food

By Julia Moravcsik, PhD, author of Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food

Strawberries picked right off the vine, bread still warm from the oven, steak sizzling from the grill. There’s something truly delicious about fresh food.

Fresh foods are delicious, and also nutritious. Most plants lose nutrients after they’ve been picked. The tastes of old food – rancidity, rottenness, staleness – tend to repel people. The reason for this is obvious. Old food is low in nutrients and high in microbes.

The taste of fresh food can be a powerful ally. One of your child’s greatest enemies in his food education is processed food. Processed food companies have perfected foods that are bland, sugary, fatty, and that appeal to children. As with cigarettes, if children learn to like processed foods when they are young, they will be buying similar processed food when they are adults. The processed food companies will have a customer for life.

However, processed food companies cannot duplicate the taste of fresh produce and home cooked meals because their food is not fresh. Even the newest foods in the supermarket have probably been away from the factory for at least a week.

Processed food companies try to make up for the lack of real food taste by appealing to the sweet-fat-bland tastes. Even though the food doesn’t really taste good, children who are fed processed food learn to like the insipid flavors because they are familiar, and because they associate them with the food’s addictive qualities.

If you feed your child fresh, tasty food, he will find the processed food repugnant. Since most processed food is unnutritious and has repetitive ingredients, this repugnance will help him avoid some of the biggest nutritional enemies in our modern culture.

Fruits and vegetables taste especially good when they are fresh. Children who balk at lifeless supermarket broccoli may love the vivid taste of fresh picked broccoli.

Tips and Techniques

Most of your meals should be home-cooked. If you aren’t skilled in cooking, you can learn by doing – start with a few easy recipes and slowly increase your repertoire.

Find recipes that are quick and easy. Quickly sautéing some vegetables and adding some eggs and cheese to make scrambled eggs with vegetables doesn’t really take much longer than microwaving a breakfast meal.

Eat at restaurants that serve real, fresh food from basic ingredients. Avoid fast-food restaurants (you don’t want to teach your child to like the taste of fast food) and cheap chain restaurants (they often have processed ingredients delivered to them).

Use the freshest vegetables that you can. Buy local produce in season. Go to a farmer’s market.

Sign up for community supported agriculture. With community supported agriculture, you buy a share of a farm at the beginning of the growing season. Each week, you’ll receive a delivery of tasty fresh vegetables.

Experiment with growing your own vegetables. Nothing is tastier than fresh peas or tomatoes off the vine.

Want to learn more techniques?
25 Ways to Get Your Child to Love Vegetables

Would you like a simple, easy-to-follow program that will teach your child to love healthy food? See my new book Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food on amazon.com.

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Switching From a Junk Food Diet to a Healthy Diet May Make Your Child Stop Eating -- But Don't Worry!

By Julia Moravcsik, PhD, author of Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food  OK, you've decided to take the plunge and feed your child nothing but healthy food. You've thrown away all sugary foods -- candy bars, ice cream, granola bars are in the trash. You've stocked up on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and other healthy foods. The frozen kids meals, crackers, and chips are gone.

The day has come. You put a plate of healthy food in front of your child. He doesn't eat it! Never mind, you think, he'll eat the next meal. But no...day after day goes by and your poor darling barely eats anything!

You begin to worry. Maybe your child just doesn't like healthy food. It's better to give him a little junk food than to starve him, isn't it? You begin to waver in your resolve.

Rest assured. It is completely normal for kids to stop eating if they don't get their junk food. Scientists have found that rats will starve themselves if they have become addicted to junk food and the junk food is taken away. Your child is used to getting a high from junk food, just like a cocaine addict does. Normal, healthy food simply doesn't provide that high.

What the article doesn't mention is that after a period of withdrawal, junk-food-addicted rats will start to eat normal food. If you persevere and continue to give your child healthy food, he will start to eat it. And, because he is no longer addicted to junk food, he will actually like the healthy food. It will taste good to him.

Tips and Techniques

Go cold turkey with your child. Remove all junk food and give him healthy food. Expect a period of time where he will not eat very much. This is normal. After a few weeks of withdrawal, your child will emerge with a new palate, uncorrupted by the addiction of junk food.

Would you like a simple, easy-to-follow program that will teach your child to love healthy food? See my new book Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food on amazon.com.

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Give Your Newborn Baby TASTES of Real Food

By Julia Moravcsik, PhD, author of Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food

Flavors in Breastmilk Teach Babies the Taste of Food

Believe it or not, babies actually learn how food tastes in the first four months of their lives, before you even feed them solid food! They learn these tastes from breastmilk.

The food that you eat finds its way into your milk, flavoring it. If you eat garlic, your milk will have a faint taste of garlic. If you eat carrots, your milk will have a faint taste of carrots.

Babies use this subtle information to learn lifelong taste preferences. The faint flavors of breastmilk are telling them which foods are safe and nutritious. If Mom has eaten these foods and survived, these foods have passed the test. Nature has given babies a valuable tool for learning to like safe and nutritious foods which will be part of their diets in upcoming years.

Formula-Fed Babies Are Missing Out on Valuable Lessons

Formula-fed babies have a disadvantage. The taste of formula is the same at each meal. These babies don't experience the subtle tastes of garlic, carrots, or broccoli, so they don't learn to like these healthy tastes in the early, formative weeks of their lives.

Scientists have found that formula-fed babies are pickier eaters later on in life because they don't get these valuable taste lessons in their formative years.

Giving Tastes of Healthy Foods Helps Babies Like Them For the Rest of Their Lives

Both formula-fed and breastfed babies can learn healthy tastes in their early weeks if you give them TASTES of real food. Here's what I mean by a taste. A taste is not a spoonful, or even a dab. A taste is a tiny smear, so small that it is barely taste-able. Put a tiny smear on the mouthpiece of the bottle. Breastfeeding moms can smear it on their skin where the baby latches on.

Give TASTES, Not Servings

Your doctor may have told you not to feed your child solid food until 4 months. They are correct. However, this is not feeding. It is tasting.

Doctors don't like to encourage early feeding of solid foods for these reasons.

• They're concerned about choking.
• They're concerned that feeding solid food will make babies drink less milk.
• They're afraid that early feeding will cause allergies.

Because you're only giving a TINY amount, babies won't choke or drink less milk.

Add Tiny Amounts to Formula

You can also add tiny amounts of food to formula. Make sure the consistency is as thin as milk so your baby doesn't choke. 

Early Tastings Don't Cause Allergies

The concern about allergies is very interesting because recent research has made it controversial. Scientists used to think that feeding a baby a food early in life would cause an allergy to that food. The rationale was that babies' immature immune systems would overreact.

However, recent research has found exactly the opposite! Many recent studies (including this one and this one) have found that giving young babies food seems to prevent allergies to that food.

More importantly for your mission to teach your baby to like healthy foods, feeding babies solid food early seems to make them less picky later on in life. Children who start eating solid food after six months are pickier than children who start eating solid food early because they don't experience food tastes in their formative years. And children that are pickier are more likely to eat junk food instead of healthy food.

How Much To Give

Give your baby a tiny, tiny taste of healthy foods like a drop of carrot juice, a speck of mashed avocado, or a tiny smidgen of juice from a ripe peach.

Your goal is to only give him enough so that he tastes the food.

Make sure the consistency of the food is similar to milk so that your baby does not choke. You can mix foods like avocado with milk until it is runny and then put a drop or two in your babies mouth.

Would you like a simple, easy-to-follow program that will teach your child to love healthy food? See my new book Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food on amazon.com.

Here Are Some Other Ways To Help Your Child Learn to Love Healthy Foods

Let Your Child Smell Flavorful Foods
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