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 Researchers found that 14-month-old babies who regularly ate fruits
and vegetables were more likely to eat them and less likely to be
fussy eaters when they were nearly four years old.
“The take-home message for parents is pretty simple: introduce your
toddler to a range of healthy foods early . . . this means offering
your child a variety of different fruits and vegetables,” said lead
author Kimberley Mallan, a researcher at the Institute of Health and
Biomedical Innovation, Queensland University of Technology in
Brisbane.
“Children need to learn to like some foods, particularly vegetables,
and repeated, neutral exposure is the best approach,” she said.
Food preferences are developed as early as the first two years of
life, Mallan and colleagues write in Journal of the Academy of
Nutrition and Dietetics. But up to a third of children do not eat
fruits and vegetables in their first three years and most eat
unhealthy snack foods, according to past research.
About a fourth of Australian children and nearly a third of American
youth are overweight or obese, the authors note.
The researchers compared the dietary habits of 174 children whose
mothers received nutrition counseling to 165 who did not. All were
part of a larger Australian study of mothers and children from
Brisbane and Adelaide, starting in 2008 and 2009.
Dietitians and psychologists counseled the mothers in six 1.5- to
2-hour interactive group sessions every two weeks. Data on babies
were collected at birth, age four months and age 14 months, with
follow-up at two years and 3.7 years.
Researchers used various scales and questionnaires to measure the
number of fruits and vegetables and “noncore foods” the children
tried weekly at each age. Noncore foods are not in the “core” food
groups like milk, which babies and young kids should consume every
day, according to nutrition guidelines. They include cookies, candy,
salty snacks and other less-healthy foods.
Both groups of mothers had about the same number of fussy kids at
age 14 months.
The babies who tried a greater number of fruits and vegetables liked
these foods more at 3.7 years than those who did not eat the items
when they were younger. Eating a greater number of noncore foods as
an infant was also associated with liking those snacks more as a
3.7-year-old.
“Parents are not ‘depriving’ their child by not offering these
foods, rather they are investing in their child’s long-term health .
. . ,” Mallan said by email to Reuters Health.
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The associations were still strong after accounting for maternal age
at delivery, education and BMI, the child’s sex, breastfeeding
duration, age when solid foods were introduced and infant fussiness.
Trying fewer vegetables (though not fruits and non-core items, which
tend to be sweeter) as infants was also tied to more fussiness as
children.
Lara Field, a registered dietitian with a nutrition counseling
practice in Chicago, said the results might not “correlate” to the
U.S. because of different obesity rates, cultural factors,
accessibility to fresh food or popularity of fast food. But the
study reinforces the importance of introducing healthy foods early
and encouraging children to eat fruits and vegetables, rather than
filling up on unhealthy snacks, she said.
“When children reject a food, is it because they don’t like it, or
is it because they have been fed too many snacks throughout the day,
and are simply too full to be interested in food? When approached
with a plate of broccoli, they may reject it, but if they were
hungry, perhaps they would have been more willing to eat it,” Field
said in an email.
Parents also need to adopt the same healthy eating they expect of
their kids and find ways to make meals enjoyable, said Field, who
was not involved in the study.
“Bottom line, kids mimic what they see at home,” said Field. “If you
want your kids to eat veggies, you need to also.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1JxOGDe Journal of the Academy of Nutrition
and Dietetics, online July 18, 2015.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
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