Getting Kids To Eat Healthy

August 14, 2012

Interview with Natalie Digate Muth, M.D., author of the book Eat Your Vegetables and Other Mistakes Parents Make: Redefining How to Raise Healthy Eaters

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Mike Carruthers:
Getting kids to eat healthy foods like vegetables has always been a challenge.

Dr. Natalie Digate Muth:
Kids intrinsically and all of the people like foods that are sweet and salty and that’s probably due to evolutionary reasons and most vegetables are bitter and most of the things that kids love are either sweet or sour.
 

Pediatrician Dr. Natalie Muth, author of the book Eat Your Vegetables and Other Mistakes Parents Make, says trying to force kids to eat healthy usually backfires.

Kids sense like if mom is making me eat this it must not taste very good so I’m not going to eat it. And the more that they push it the more that the kid decides not to eat it and that they like it even less.

Getting kids to like healthy foods is a process.

And there’s a well-known rule of thumb that it takes about 15-20 times for a child to like a previously rejected food or something that they don’t automatically like. The more you expose the child to a food the more likely they are to like it. It’s the same thing as for adults we don’t intrinsically like coffee or tea it’s bitter you probably don’t like it the first time you tried it – vegetables are the same way.

Dr. Muth says a hungry child will eat so making sure your kids are hungry at dinner time is really important. And giving them some control over what they eat also helps.

So one way to give the child control is to say, “Ok this is what we’re having for dinner but we haven’t chosen a vegetable yet what vegetable would you like to have?” So the kid feels at least like they have some involvement in the process they’ll be more likely to eat.