In my last post I argued that it’s time to stop telling parents they need to know more about nutrition. Parents, I said, already know enough to feed their kids well, and to the extent that parents feed their kids unhealthy foods, they do it because it helps the wheels of family life run a little more smoothly.
But here’s another reason to stop harping on nutrition: it makes smart parents teach their kids unhealthy eating habits. Not for any subversive, conspiracy-theory reasons. (Trust, me; I’m not imagining a band of rogue parents intentionally seducing their children into eating all the wrong things). Rather, the constant discussion about nutrition in our culture inadvertently teaches children to hate healthy foods. How?
We’re a nation of hypocrites. It seems like we put healthy food (and healthy eaters) on a pedestal, but which foods do we really celebrate? The junk. Think about what I call The Chocolate Cake Look. You know the one, it’s the look you use when you bring out a chocolate cake: you become animated, your eyes light up, your voice goes up about an octave. Ever seen anyone use that look for broccoli?
What message does that teach your kids?
And when we do ooh and aah over healthy food, we do it either by remarking that the healthy food doesn’t really taste “healthy,” (because we all know that healthy foods taste bad) or we trip over ourselves to see who can drool over the one “unhealthy” ingredient—“it has lots of gooey cheese”—the most.
What message does that teach your kids?
Almost every social message about food reinforces the idea that healthy food is necessary but not tasty. And that junk is the food we want, but shouldn’t have. No wonder research shows that Americans intuitively think junk food=yum and healthy food=yuk.1
Think you’re an exception? Think again. The research also shows that even people who think they believe healthy food is tasty, still subconsciously classify unhealthy foods with enjoyment more readily than they classify healthy food with enjoyment.
It’s not hard to prove the validity of this point. I often ask seminar participants to close their eyes and imagine their favorite healthy food. We really get into it by picturing that delicious salad, that favorite entrée. You can practically see people salivating. Then I ask everyone to picture their favorite chocolate cake. Or ice cream. Or their junk of choice. No one has ever argued that their favorite healthy food beats their favorite treat.
The experts have lots of reasons why children reject vegetables: they naturally like sweet foods and vegetables don’t fit this flavor profile; toddlers go through a picky phase (known as neophobia) at the exact developmental moment when they’re becoming more mobile because this is Mother Nature’s way of keeping kids from ingesting poisonous things.
These explanations have some truth, no doubt, but they paint an incomplete picture, especially since children don’t develomentally “age-out” of bad eating habits. Compared to 2-5 year olds,
- 6-11 year olds are 2.7 times more likely to under-consume fruit and 1.5 times more likely to under-consume vegetables.
- Adolescents are 4 times more likely to under-consume fruit and nearly 2.5 times more likely to under-consume vegetables.2
To understand the eating habits of children over time we have to find an explanation that exists over time. Here are two:
- Our cultural dialogue about nutrition has led to The Medicalization of the Meal. We “sell” healthy food based on the nutrients it provides but we “sell” treats based on how good they taste.” This turns people away from healthy food and towards treats.
- In response to the pressure to do the right thing, parents look for foods that contain enough of the “right” nutrients (think chicken nuggets, they have protein) even though these foods push our kids’ taste buds away from healthy foods and towards junk.
It’s counterintuitive, but the way to teach children to eat healthy foods is to stop talking about how healthy the food is. Instead, we have to change the conversation to habits. There are only three habits that translate nutrition into behavior—proportion, variety, moderation. (You can read about these in my last post.) We need to start teaching young kids these habits from the get-go, because habits learned early on in life have a tendency to stick around.
~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~
1 Raghunathan, R., R. Walker Naylor, and W. D. Hoyer. 2006. “The Unhealthy = Tasty Intuition and Its Effects on Taste Inferences, Enjoyment, and Choice of Food Products.” Journal of Marketing 70: 170-84.
2 Lorson, B., H. R. Melgar-Quinonez, and C. Taylor, A. 2009. “Correlates of Fruit and Vegetable Intakes in Us Children.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 109 (3): 474-78.
© 2014 Dina Rose, PhD, is the author of the book, It’s Not About the Broccoli: Three Habits to Teach Your Kids for a Lifetime of Healthy Eating (Perigee Books). She also writes the blog It's Not About Nutrition.