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 “We know that children develop their food preferences based on early
experiences with foods, so it is important to introduce healthy
foods in early years,” said lead author Betty T. Izumi of Portland
State University in Oregon.
“There’s a general myth that kids don’t like vegetables,” but that’s
not necessarily true, Izumi told Reuters Health by phone.
Between fall of 2012 and spring of 2013, four Head Start centers in
Portland, Oregon, implemented the Harvest for Health Kids program.
The “target” foods included carrot, butternut squash, sweet potato,
cabbage, turnip, rutabaga, berries, beet, and asparagus, all
prepared with simple recipes designed to highlight, not mask, their
flavor. The researchers chose local, seasonal foods, as they would
be more affordable and would taste best, Izumi said.
Two centers used a low-intervention form, which only included food
service changes wherein the target foods were served twice per week
as the fruit or vegetable component of meals.
The other two centers used a high-intervention form, with food
service changes as well as nutrition education, with monthly
activity kits designed to improve food knowledge through cooking
activities, read-aloud book discussions and mealtime discussions.
Teachers at these centers completed a four-hour hands-on training
session before the intervention began and then a two-hour booster
session.
Before and after the program, trained researchers assessed 226
participating children, who averaged about five years old, by
offering them small samples of each target food.
In the low-intervention group, willingness to try the foods
increased after the program for four of the nine target foods:
cabbage, rutabaga, turnip and beet.
In the high-intervention group, willingness to try increased for
every food. In this group, 55 percent of kids were willing to try
rutabaga before the program and 84 percent were willing to try it
after the program.
Among those who tried the foods, the number who said they liked it
also increased for carrot, cabbage and berries in the
low-intervention group and for carrot, rutabaga and berries in the
high-intervention group, the authors reported in the Journal of the
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
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“It makes perfect sense that the schools that got high intervention
which included nutrition education had better results,” said Abbie
Nelson, the director of Vermont Food Education Every Day (VT FEED),
a farm-to-school program connecting schools to local farms in the
state. Nelson was not part of the new study.
“It’s not just about throwing a rutabaga stick at a kid and saying,
try this,” she told Reuters Health by phone. “It’s more about
familiarity, what does rutabaga look like, smell like, feel like.”
One of the key parts of teacher training involved role modeling.
Even if the teachers themselves did not like the foods, they were
directed to try it and find something interesting about the food to
share with the kids, Izumi said.
“That could be, ‘this is really crunchy, why don’t you take a
bite’,” she said. “It’s really important not to fake it.”
“Parents influence children’s food preferences more than anybody
else,” she said. “Even if children eat foods in preschool, after
graduation, we need to continue to provide children with vegetables
beyond that period.”
It can be hard for low-income families to buy and prepare fresh
vegetables, but persistence is key, Izumi said.
“If you have a picky eater, then you continue introducing the foods
and serving them but in different ways, try roasting them,” she
said. “It’s important not to hide vegetables.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1KfqyFD Journal of the Academy of Nutrition
and Dietetics, online August 31, 2015.
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