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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Eat Vegetables for Breakfast

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

In Western cultures, vegetables are rarely served for breakfast. This is unfortunate.

Breakfast is a great time to serve your child vegetables.  Here are some reasons why:

Breakfast Provides Another Opportunity for Vegetables

In order to teach your child to love vegetables (the food group with the longest learning curve), you'll want to give them to him at least 3 times a day. If you serve vegetables for breakfast, that only leaves two more servings to think about.

Breakfast Foods Are Learned For Life

People tend to be conservative about their breakfast choices. A person who happily eats a wide variety of dishes for lunch or dinner may eat the same bagel, cream cheese, and coffee every day. If you get your child accustomed to a vegetable for breakfast in his early formative years, he may continue this habit for the rest of his life.

Vegetables for Breakfast Makes Kids Like Them for Lunch 

A third reason to serve vegetables for breakfast is that kids tend to eat MORE vegetables if they've had them recently. It seems counterintuitive, but kids who eat a vegetable get into a "healthy mode" of appetite. You probably have noticed in yourself that if you eat a doughnut, you don't have much of a desire for a salad, but if you eat a tasty bowl of vegetable soup, other healthy food seems tasty. If you feed your child a vegetable for breakfast, he'll be more interested in vegetables for lunch, snacks, and dinner.

Read more about this technique here.

What is a Healthy Breakfast?

The healthiest breakfast should have some protein (eggs, sausage, cheese, etc.), vegetables and fruit.

How to Serve Vegetables for Breakfast

If I've convinced you to feed your child vegetables for breakfast, your next question is probably "how?". What vegetable recipes are still respectable breakfast food? Most people think of cereal, bakery items, eggs, and bacon when they think of breakfast food. Vegetables rarely factor in.

One option is the time-honored hash browns or home fries. You can use frozen hash browns or microwave a potato in the microwave, chop it up, and saute it in olive oil. Potatoes are just a start to this dish, however. You can add almost any vegetable to the potatoes to make them more interesting and nutritious. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, onions, garlic, fresh herbs (rosemary, sage, oregano), sweet potatoes...and any other vegetable you happen to have in your refrigerator. Just chop them up and cook them along with the potatoes.

Another time-honored option is the omelet or scramble. Saute chopped vegetables in olive oil, add herbs, and then scramble in an egg. More experienced cooks (or those with more time) can pour the vegetables on a plate temporarily, and then use the same pan for cooking an omelet, with the vegetables added as a filling.

Once you get used to eating vegetables for breakfast, you can branch out into less conventional breakfast dishes. Your young child doesn't know the conventions of his culture yet, so a side of buttered lima beans (call them "breakfast beans"!) won't phase him at all.

Remember, if you teach your 3 year old to like vegetables for breakfast, he may still be making vegetables for himself when he's 30 years old! A lifetime of good eating habits begins in the first few years.

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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Vegetable of the Week: Zucchini

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

Each week, start teaching your child to like a new vegetable. Follow these 4 rules:

1. Feed each vegetable to your child twice a week.

2. Give your child the vegetable two times a week for six weeks. That’s a total of 12 times. After 12 presentations, your child will probably like the vegetable. If she doesn’t, wait for a few months and start the whole process again.

3. Don’t feed the same vegetable to your child two days in a row. Wait a day or two before giving her the vegetable again.

4. If your child tastes the vegetable, count it as a success. She may spit it out, but her brain is still registering the taste.

Six weeks from today your child will probably be an zucchini lover!

About Zucchini

Zucchini is a sweet, mild-tasting vegetable, and many children like it. Its one drawback is that the middles can be somewhat slimy. Children have an instinct to avoid slimy foods, because sliminess is an indicator that a food may be rotten.

If your child seems to dislike the texture, start by stir-frying the zucchini (olive oil and garlic work wonderfully here). Once your child learns to love zucchini this way, you can boil it.

Choose very firm, dark green zucchini.

Vary the dishes so your child doesn't get bored. Here are some quick and easy dishes:

1. After you cook the zucchini, add some shredded parmesan and butter.

2. Zucchini can be stir-fried in olive oil and garlic. Add some shredded parmesan cheese on top and microwave for 30 seconds to melt the parmesan.

3. Zucchini can be sliced lengthwise and served with dip.

Post a comment and tell me how it went!

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.

What is This Weird Stuff on My Plate? New Food From a Child's Point of View

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

Imagine that you're a 3 year old child. You sit down to dinner and look at your plate. Staring up at you are two unidentifiable lumps. Your task is to eat them.

A little scary, huh? Any adult confronted with unidentifiable lumps would poke around with a fork, or ask someone what they were.

Children are born with instincts that protect them from eating poisonous plants. In prehistoric days, eating something without knowing what it was could kill you.

Children will be reassured if a trusted parent tells them a little bit about the food that they are eating.

Tips and Techniques

When you give your child a new food, tell her what it's name is. If she is getting artichokes for the first time, tell her that they are called artichokes. Add a few fun facts. Tell her that artichokes are a kind of thistle, just like the prickly ones in the back yard.

When you give your child a mixture of foods, like stew, stir fry, or casserole, identify the ingredients. Point at each ingredient and say "That's chicken, that's carrots, that's an onion. Your child will look relieved because she doesn't have to put an unfamiliar and potentially yucky food in her 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.