Ways to encourage healthier appetite

12 April 2012

British parents are among the worst at making sure their children eat their greens - letting them gorge on sugary, fatty food at mealtimes, scientists claim today.

They put forward a six-point plan to get picky children to eat a healthier, more balanced diet, with less burgers, chips and chicken nuggets.

The British Association Annual Science Festival heard that in a sample of 428 children aged four and five, more than a third disliked many vegetables, a fifth disliked meat, fish, eggs or cheese, and almost as many disliked fruit.

Sugared cereals were preferred to wholewheat cereals, white bread to brown, processed meat to butcher's cuts, creamy desserts to fruit-based ones, and chocolate to anything else on the list.

"These will not be novel observations to parents," said Professor Jane Wardle of University College, London, who carried out the research. But she said children in the United States and Britain had the most food dislikes, while those in France seemed to have relatively few.

"Some analyses suggest higher pickiness is associated with more child-centred forms of child feeding," she said. "The traditional French approach is to offer the child the same, or similar food, to the adults, and not to offer any alternatives if it is not accepted.

"In contrast, in Britain and America, we tend to favour child-centred feeding, where the children are involved in food decisions, and family meals are often centred around what the children like.

"If food marketers have got it right - and we fear they have - children like fatty, salty and sugary foods and, above all, familiarity."

She added that most children's menus in restaurants provided: "Burgers, fried chicken, chips, ice-cream, fizzy drinks, sugar, salt, fat, and no fruit or veg."

But looking at children's preferences in a range of countries, she found tastes were not necessarily inbuilt or universal. While English children generally loathed raw fish, Japanese children loved it - but they hated baked beans. Other research had found children preferred food they were used to, so getting them used to foods gradually tended to work.

The research led to six "golden rules":

? Think of all food dislikes as changeable.

? Assume children will not like a new food until they have had many exposures to it - unless it is full of fat, salt or sugar.

? Introduce new tastes in very small amounts.

? Introduce healthy food as early as possible in the weaning process.

? Adults should choose the food for children, except for special treat occasions.

? Have nothing in the house that children prefer to what they've got on their plates.

But, the meeting in Leicester heard, saying "It's good for you," can be a bad idea as the automatic assumption is "if it's good for me it probably won't taste that great".

Children given a drink and told it was good for them drank less of it, and rated it less nice, than others given an identical drink without comment.

The research also found bribing children to eat something worked only as long as the bribes continued.

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