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Scientists Discover How To Get Kids To Eat Their Vegetables
HughPickens.com writes: Roberto Ferdman writes in the Washington Post that researchers at Texas A&M University, looking for patterns in food consumption among elementary school children, found an interesting quirk about when and why kids choose to eat their vegetables. After analyzing plate waste data from nearly 8,500 students, it seems there's at least one variable that tends to affect whether kids eat their broccoli, spinach or green beans more than anything: what else is on the plate. Kids are much more likely to eat their vegetable portion when it's paired with a food that isn't so delicious that it gets all the attention. For example, when chicken nuggets and burgers, the most popular items among schoolchildren, are on the menu, vegetable waste tends to rise significantly. When other less-beloved foods, like deli sliders or baked potatoes, are served, the opposite seems to happen."Our research team looked at whether there is a relationship between consumption of certain entrees and vegetables that would lead to plate waste," says Dr. Oral Capps Jr. "We found that popular entrees such as burgers and chicken nuggets, contributed to greater waste of less popular vegetables."
Traci Man, who has been studying eating habits, self-control and dieting for more than 20 years, believes that food pairings are crucial in getting kids to eat vegetables. "Normally, vegetables will lose the competition that they're in — the competition with all the other delicious food on your plate. Vegetables might not lose that battle for everyone, but they do for most of us. This strategy puts vegetables in a competition they can win, by pitting vegetables against no food at all. To do that, you just eat your vegetable first, before any of the other food is there," says Mann. "We tested it with kids in school cafeterias, where it more than quadrupled the amount of vegetables eaten. It's just about making it a little harder to make the wrong choices, and a little easier to make the right ones."
Traci Man, who has been studying eating habits, self-control and dieting for more than 20 years, believes that food pairings are crucial in getting kids to eat vegetables. "Normally, vegetables will lose the competition that they're in — the competition with all the other delicious food on your plate. Vegetables might not lose that battle for everyone, but they do for most of us. This strategy puts vegetables in a competition they can win, by pitting vegetables against no food at all. To do that, you just eat your vegetable first, before any of the other food is there," says Mann. "We tested it with kids in school cafeterias, where it more than quadrupled the amount of vegetables eaten. It's just about making it a little harder to make the wrong choices, and a little easier to make the right ones."
Eat you vegatables ... OR STARVE !!
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Well, why not just reduce the serving size of the "delicious" food on your plate? Three chicken wings + as much broccoli as you like...
Or, maybe those kids' taste buds are actually signalling them to get the nutritious food first, and eat the unimportant remainder later (or never). What's the nutritious value of broccoli, anyways? There's a reason vegetable gardens used to be wayyyy smaller than the main crops.
Maybe kids are fat because they are being served prepared foods with insane amounts of sugar (as in HFCS), while at the same time their parents are being told that their kids must not go out and play alone, for fear of the ubiquitous imagined child predator. Turn off the internet for their PS4s and put them out in the rain, they'll live (and lose weight, and eventually have fun).
> Kids are much more likely to eat their vegetable portion when it's paired with a food that isn't so delicious
Here you go kid,"Spam, dirt and carrots."
"Ewww, I'll eat the carrots"
"Excellent, I thought you might choose that."
God spoke to me
A couple of months ago, my mom sees me struggling to shove (not literally) some veggies down my kid's throat and goes, "Stop trying to force-feed her. Leave the food there and when she's hungry, she'll grab it herself".
Pretty obvious, no? A pity you need a team of researchers and a project to reach this momentous conclusion.
There is nothing new about this tactic. You can get almost anyone to make choices by framing the problem. Child whines that they want a cookie. You don't ask if they wouldn't want an apple instead. You ask do they want an apple or carrots? You frame the issue and give them choices but only the choices you want. The kid is happy because he got to make the choice (or thinks he did) and you are happy because he's eating something that is nutritious.
Politicians do this all the time to (alleged) adults. They frame issues and present a limited menu of options out of which the most appealing option is the one they want you to go for. Works astonishingly effectively
The reason vegetable gardens were smaller was because either the main crop would bring more money in, or that there was limited space left over for a vegge garden. At least they used to have gardens!
Its not often nutritious food that we crave, its the hard-for-cavemen-to-obtain food that we love. Fatty, sugary, salty food is not so good for us in the quantities we eat, and that the real problem - its too readily available If we only ate small amounts, we'd be fine (he said while eating a huge cookie).
And yes, this has the same sense of igNobility about it as anecdotal studies show that if you give kids loads of sweets they won't have appetite left for dinner, no matter what it is.
And yes, this has the same sense of igNobility about it as anecdotal studies show that if you give kids loads of sweets they won't have appetite left for dinner, no matter what it is.
It sounds like a no-brainer, but sometimes you really smart fockers forget that a great percentage of the population actually engaged in child rearing is less intelligent than you.
Hearing something like this, over and over if necessary, can only help what has become an epidemic of poor Western dietary trends.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Thinking back about the things that I enjoyed as a child, it seems quite ridiculous one would even eat them. I grew up in rural South India, with tamarind trees (Tamarindus indica), a kind of wild tamarind (kodukkaapuli, Pithecellobium dulce), palm trees on public land and mango, jackfruit, coconut trees in private lands. We throw stones at the trees to knock down the fruit and eat it, usually without bothering to wash it! The tender tamarind fruit is barely edible, not sweet and has bitter overtones. Only goats eat the wild tamarind. Jackfruit and coconut cant be knocked down by thrown stones, nor can they be eaten by children without help from adults. Mango is good, but usually you would get chased by farmers and the trees would be guarded by their wives. But if you manage to get some mangoes stolen, you eat like a king, even if the actual fruit is underripe and tastes like bitter gourd. Palm fruit can't be knocked down. But if you beg the tappers who climb palm trees to tap the sap to make toddy they will throw down a few palm fruits. Delicious pulp inside, but don't tell Mom, the toddy tappers are low caste. Somehow we love them as children and grow to mistreat them as adults.
Why did we like them so much? There were no alternatives. Most of the items you see in the dessert menu of Indian restaurants are made once a year, the rest three or four times a year.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There are lots of things that 'everybody knows' that are wrong. Actually studying these things, even though they're 'obvious' lets us weed out the ones that were just bad assumptions and often refine the ones that actually do have some basis in reality.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
The footnote explains that in order to get kids to eat Brussels Sprouts, they had to be paired with waterboarding.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
What is sad is that scientists got paid to "figure" this out. Parents have know this forever.
I coach kids in sports. I can assure you that a LOT of parents do not understand this and you can see the results in their kid's waistlines. Furthermore most of these same parents wouldn't deign to eat a vegetable themselves. Most of the parents of the parents of the kids I coach are fat, out of shape and eat like garbage cans. It's no surprise that the kids end up in the same boat.
Give me a pile of veggies or a piece of chocolate cake, I know which one I'm going to want to eat first. Kids aren't any different and have less self control. If you give them an attractive bad choice, most of them are going to make that bad choice.
This is a good example. If you give me a pile of veggies or a piece of chocolate cake, but I'm expected to eat both of them, I'll definitely choose the pile of veggies first.
I didn't learn this particularly well as a child, but as an adult I'm often put in situations -- like eating at someone else's house -- where I'm served some food I don't particularly like. As an adult, my choice is generally to consume the undesirable food first, because (1) I'm hungrier, so any food will taste better, and (2) I'd prefer to end my meal with something I find pleasant.
Kids often lack the self-discipline to make such a rational choice, AND they know that most parents aren't going to force-feed them. So, they eat the good stuff first and get full enough that they've satisfied their initial hunger pangs (because vegetables often are the low-calorie portion of the meal, even if high in nutrients) -- is it any wonder they aren't going to volunteer to eat all the veggies at the end??
I also think that Americans have a particular propensity to worry too much about kids not eating regularly. We often give kids snacks a number of times each day. And at mealtimes if a kid doesn't eat much, the parents often fret at night -- "Is he okay? Did he get enough? Won't he be hungry?"
In reality, the vast majority of kids obviously have excellent survival mechanisms that won't let them starve themselves. If they eat a bit less at one meal, they'll eat more at the next. If they don't have a lot of snacks, they'll be likely to eat better at meals in general. (And they'll also be less restless and better behaved, since they'll be focused on eating and satisfying hunger, rather than running around burning off the sugar from the cookie they had an hour ago.)
Parents can easily use hunger to their advantage -- it won't get kids to eat everything, but presenting something unfamiliar to kids as a "first course" will generally make it more likely that they will eat more of it... simply because they're hungry.
I never realized it was weird as a kid, but my grandparents were Italian and they always ate in courses, every single meal. When grammy makes soup, she removes the meat, has a bowl of soup, and then brings the meat out on a plate, then a salad.
Pasta and meatballs? No, pasta, then meatballs, then a salad to finish it off; even if it was just an ordinary thursday night diner.
Every night was 3 courses, and holidays were more like 6 or 7 separate courses.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
My wife's cousin is has a PhD in health science, is in great shape, eats healthily, and is a middle school PE teacher. She won't touch what her students have to eat. It is not that the food is not healthy. It is that the combination of available ingredients, the time to prepare, and the skill level of those preparing don't often end up with things that taste on the majority good. It isn't any better to teach the "lard butts" that you've got to hate eating because you teach them that healthy food tastes like garbage.
Except that's not what is happening.
Eating crap like chicken nuggets teaches kids to crave foods with crazy amounts of sugar and salt, and it skews their tastebuds to preferring crap. Chicken nuggets aren't more nutritious. They're full of more crap.
Quite a lot, actually
In other words, it's really really good for you.
Yes, because you were selling your main crop, you were surviving off your vegetable garden.
The problem is we're now on second (or third) generations of kids who have only ever eaten crap food, have been conditioned to find that food tastier, and utterly refuse to eat good food.
Look around, you can see entire families who eat like spoiled children. They won't eat vegetables. They don't cook. It's either fast food, or prepared food.
What I see is a generation of kids who never learned to eat vegetables raising another generation of kids who never will learn to eat vegetables. And I routinely see young kids as fat as I am ... and it took me a lot of years to get here.
Some of these kids are going to start keeling over in their 20s and 30s.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Parents can easily use hunger to their advantage -- it won't get kids to eat everything, but presenting something unfamiliar to kids as a "first course" will generally make it more likely that they will eat more of it... simply because they're hungry.
Of all the dumb ass psycho babble crap about parenting I've read, this has to be disconnected overly simplified load of shit ever. Do you actually know how long it takes to starve a kid into submission? It's not exactly a matter of sitting there for an hour or two to win an argument. If the kid doesn't want to eat it, they are not going to eat it. They figure out pretty early on that you aren't a lunatic and that you love them too much to actually shove a funnel down their throat and force feed them. A little later on they, hopefully, realise "Hey, my Mom and Dad aren't useless sacks of trash and I get fed multiple times a day, every day, on a pretty regular basis. I can afford to skip this meal if I want to.". After those two things happen, literally the only way to introduce new food that is in anyway different looking is through siege craft. You both sit at the table with a plate of food arranged somewhere between you and them. You as a parent try in vain to tell them how good it is and that they should just try it, "Just one bite.", "You can have ice cream after you finish.", "You can stay up and watch TV." but you know full well that you're just making noise to pass the time and that this is just the start of the battle. Eventually bedtime rolls around and you either tell them to go to their room or you tell them to sleep at the table if they have to but they are not getting up until they have eaten their food, either way the result is the same. You end up wrapping the meal up in a tupperware container in preparation for the next fight. Morning rolls around and your kid asks you about breakfast. You sit down with your plate of eggs and sausage and tell them that the only thing they are getting is the dinner that they didn't eat last night. They huff and puff as expected and the stand off starts all over again. You repeat this for the next meal if you have to until they finally break down and eat what you gave them.
I literally just went through this with my kid. And do you know what the most fucked up part of it was? It was chicken alfredo, she loves chicken alfredo we just haven't had it in a while so she had forgotten. Four miserable meals later, at dinner the next day, she finally takes a bite and says "Hm, this is actually pretty good." and the plate was clean in less than five minutes. Yeah, I can tell you for a fact that anyone who has ever said "Oh, I have never thought about hurting my kids in anger!" is either a parental doormat or they are just plain lying to your face.
I know exactly what you're thinking right now because it's the same thing every new parent and DINK thinks at this point. "I bet after you do that they learn to eat what you give them.". Hahahaha, no. This isn't like setting up a new server where it's a few hours of pain and then you are done with it. This is a regularly recurring theme.
Ah, the parental anecdote. It sounds like oyu have a tough time -- maybe try changing tact? I've found that parenting is an exercise in finding and leveraging soft power (versus hard power like them going to bed hungry, re-feeding them supper in the morning if they didn't eat it, etc). I'll match one.
I sit my kids down to eat before everything is on the table, and bring out of the kitchen and plate for them what I want them to eat -- whether it's something new, veggies, etc. Then in the 5-10 minutes where we get drinks, bring out the rest of the food and serve it, they've typically eaten 50+% of whatever I first served. They're somewhat hungry and haven't snacked and will naturally graze at what's in front of them to pass that time. Then, as you mention, because they've tried it and not found it horrible they'll usually eat the rest of it along with the rest of the food. Soft power in action -- nothing forced, but guiding the activities such that you preferentially select for the outcome that you want.
Not rocket science. Does it work every time? No. Did it work right away? No. But we formed a habit, and we're good now. It works the vast majority of the time, and they eat great elsewhere as a result. When we go out to eat or go to school, they're used to eating all of those things, so they do tend to eat a good chunk of their carrots, peas, etc. and if they don't then oh well -- they eat healthy at home, what's one meal? It's not worth fighting over in those instances since you've already won in the vast majority of the cases.
No the child's taste buds are telling them to eat the energy rich foods first. This happens because we evolved in a time when food was scarce and energy rich foods like meat were a prize to be treasured.
No the taste buds don't tell you that. For starters: meat has not much energy. Hence the reason you have to eat so extreme amounts of it if you put your diet around it.
You mean like chicken tenders? Kids today are fat because they are getting way too much food and way too little exercise. That is the fault of the adults and no one else.
No they aren't. They are fat because they only eat food that makes fat. It is easy to eat more calories in a single meal than you can burn in a whole day running.
People claiming lack of exercises is a reason to be fat should for god sake start to use google and figure how much energy the human body actually burns doing "insert your favorite exercises".
It is completely impossible to lose weight by exercises.
Every person ... regardless how dumb ... should know that. The only way is to change your diet.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.