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© 2015 by Dr Orlena Kerek.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any for or by any means. Except for brief quotations in critical reviews or
articles, without the prior written permission of Dr Orlena Kerek.

I cannot guarantee that your children will learn to eat healthily. This book aims to show you
recent research and current thinking on the subject. It aims to provide parents with the best
tools and the most stress free way to achieve such a result.

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This book is dedicated to my beautiful and wonderful family, especially to my children and
husband. Without you my life would be incomplete.

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5
 Crunch! Put a Stop to Picky
Eating and Help Your Kids
Love Veggies
Dr Orlena Kerek, paediatric doctor and mother of 4 shows you the stress free way to teach
your children to enjoy a healthy diet.
7
8
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 Free Video Course
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 Yum! Deliciously Healthy
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Or, if you prefer a paper copy, head over to the Amazon store.
 Introduction
Most parents want to feed their children a healthy diet. They have good intentions. It’s just
that things don’t quite turn out as they hope. They present children with tasty vegetables
only to have them thrust back at them.

It appears that children have minds of their own and they are not keen on healthy food. They
don’t like green, they don’t like healthy and they don’t like vegetables.

The good intentions turn into stressful meals, children cry, parents scream, children scream
louder and eventually parents fall back on what they know their children will eat, namely
junk food.

It’s quick and easy and kids will eat it. It’s understandable.

But there is another way.

This book will show you how to teach your kids to eat and love healthy food. In the easi-
est, most stress free way.

Healthy eating is about forming healthy habits. Habits are things that we do without think-
ing. Children who are used to eating healthily don’t think of themselves as eating healthily.
They just eat food that they like. They eat healthy food that they like.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Bringing up children is a difficult job. But it’s one that we signed up
for. Developing healthy eating habits doesn’t happen overnight. Of course there are ups and
downs. Times when it gets tough.

If you keep going, one day you’ll wake up and look at your children reaching for a bowl of
lettuce, or helping themselves to some cabbage and you’ll know that you did that. You gave
them the gift of choosing a healthy diet and developing healthy habits that will hopefully
stay with them for life.

I know that these habits can stay with you for life from personal experience. I’m tall and slim,
even after having four children. But you know what? I don’t do anything special. I just eat
healthily and do a moderate amount of exercise (mostly in the form of running around after
my children). I have never really thought of myself as a ‘healthy eater’ I just eat what I’ve al-
ways eaten, what my mother always gave us, vegetables and salad. I can’t contemplate hav-
ing a meal without either salad or vegetables. I just can’t do it. I don’t enjoy it. I feel as if I
haven’t eaten properly if I don’t have either salad or vegetables. And you know why? Be-
cause those are the habits that I grew up with. My mother always gave us either vegetables or
salad and now all of my siblings and I always eat heaps of vegetables. So we are living proof
that it is totally do-able!

If you are struggling to feed your children a healthy diet and you’re prepared to do some
cooking (however simple) then this book is for you. It is aimed to give you the tools to sur-
vive the rocky road of forming healthy habits. To help you help your children. To help you
and your family enjoy eating healthy food.

Who Am I?
My name is Orlena. Or Dr Orlena Kerek if we’re going to be formal. I’m a paediatric doctor
from the UK. Now I live and work in Spain with my four young and gorgeous children.

As a doctor I’ve always had an interest in diet. Perhaps I should say, a professional curiosity.
Before I had kids of my own I would marvel at the number of children who would come to
clinic with a tummy ache. I’d ask them what their favourite vegetable was. Normally the an-
swer was 'chips'. A little hint that their diet wasn’t exactly ‘healthy’. I would give advice to
increase the amount of vegetables, to get kids involved in the kitchen, to grow food. It was
friendly advice although I suspect not many parents paid me much attention. Secretly I
vowed that my children would be healthy eaters. I wasn’t going to be a mother of a ‘fussy
eater’.

Then I had children. It’s true. The only time you have all the answers to parenting problems
is before you actually have children. After that you realise how difficult it really is.

I fed my children a healthy diet. Or at least, a relatively healthy diet. Then one day, disaster
struck. One of the children sat crying on the toilet as their poo was too hard to come out.
They had constipation. How could one of my children have a diet related problem? They ate
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loads of vegetables. Or at least I thought they did. Clearly I was wrong. It was then that I be-
gan my quest into actually looking at what my children ate and the best methods to help
them eat healthily.

I realised that many parents struggle to feed their children a healthy diet. Sometimes they
don’t know how to go about it, sometimes they don’t know what a healthy diet is and some-
times it’s a question of time. My desire to help my children eat healthily and to form healthy
eating habits has led to places I never dreamt of. In order to help other parents I now have a
host of resources, The SnottyNoses website, this book and an online course called How to
Help Your Children Eat Healthily. It’s been amazing fun and I hope useful to you as well.

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 In A Nutshell
I know many people don’t want to read a whole book to get to the crux of the matter. If you
just want a summary of the whole book, a sheet cheat, then here you are.

1. Have a Healthy Eating Routine. Every few hours, you offer your children an oppor-
tunity to eat some healthy food. Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner works well for
most people.

2. During those times, offer your kids healthy food. Allow them to eat what they want
and leave what they don’t want.

3. Do NOT pressure them to eat. No bribery, no cajoling, no encouraging. No “one tiny

polite bite”.

4. Do NOT be pressured into giving them a treat when you were planning a healthy
snack.

5. Treats are fine in moderation (but moderation is the key.)

6. Offer lots of fruit and vegetables (more than you expect them to eat.)

7. Offer them fruit and vegetables as frequently as possible (at every meal if you can).

8. Offer lots of variety.

9. Be patient when introducing new foods, don’t expect kids to eat them, but keep of-
fering them.

10. Model healthy eating yourself.

11. Eat healthy family meals as often as you can.

12. Relax and enjoy eating with your family.

Of course, there is lots more information and tips in the book, but if you just follow this ad-
vice, you’ll be well on your way to healthy eating.
 Why Is Healthy Eating
Important?
Why do we want to feed our children a healthy diet? For starters, it’s an act of love. We took
on this huge responsibility of parenthood, to love and nurture our children and a big part of
that is feeding them. Putting effort into feeding them is a physical display of our love for our
children.

Secondly, children’s feeding habits start very early on, before the second year of life. Don’t
worry if your children are older than two, it’s not too late to change feeding habits, it’s just
that we have a window of opportunity before the age of two.

Food is more than just nutrition, more than just the energy and building blocks that we need
to run our bodies. Food and eating are incorporated into social functions and our social his-
tory. Food and eating are also about communicating, family history, traditions and emotional
health. Part of eating healthily is to have a good relationship with food, to eat when we’re
hungry, to stop when we’re full, to enjoy treats, parties and festivals but to recognise that
treats are special. When we have a healthy relationship with food, we can enjoy the food and
social aspect of parties without worrying.

Importantly, of course, as is becoming more and more well known, there are huge health be-
nefits to healthy eating.

General Health Benefits

Firstly there are what I call ‘general health’ benefits. So for example, vitamin A contributes to
healthy eyes and skin, vitamin C to healthy gums and teeth, and iron helps wounds and cuts
to heal. Where do we find all these vitamins? In our diet.

Growth and development are, of course, linked to diet. In order to grow healthily a child
needs lots of things. They need to be loved and nurtured and they need the absence of chron-
ic or long term illness. They also need all those nutrients that we find in a healthy diet.

Equally, children need stimulation for healthy development but they also need a healthy diet
to feed those growing and learning brains.
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Short Term Problems Associated with a
Poor Diet

1. Constipation
Constipation is a very common illness in childhood. Normally constipation is caused by a
poor diet that doesn’t contain enough fruit and vegetables, or more specifically fibre. I ex-
plain constipation to children with my toothpaste analogy. Think of our bowel as a long tube
that runs from our mouths to our bottoms, with muscles in the walls to push things along.
Think of that tube as a tube of toothpaste. When the toothpaste is new and full, that’s our
bowel with lots of fibre in it. We squeeze it a bit and the toothpaste comes out easily (yep, us
going to the toilet.) But when the toothpaste is empty, that last little bit that we try to squeeze
out, that’s our bowel with no fibre. It pushes hard but there’s nothing to push. It can be very
painful.

Constipation that is caused by a poor diet can be avoided with a healthy diet. That’s to say by
eating enough fibre. Most people are unaware that they don’t eat enough fruit and veget-
ables. MyPlate recommend that 50% of what you eat should be fruit and vegetables but that
50% of people don’t eat that much.

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2. Obesity and Weight Problems
In the USA around 20% of children have weight problems. It’s also a problem in other de-
veloped countries such as the UK. The WHO (World Health Organisation) says that world-
wide there are 42 million obese children under the age of five. That’s preschool children.

The sad thing is that unless those children change their eating habits, that problem is going to
follow them into adulthood. Once you have a weight problem, it’s much more difficult to fix
than it is to avoid in the first place. There are lots of physical problems associated with being
overweight, not to mention psychological problems.

3. Type 2 Diabetes
Associated with obesity we see a rise in type 2 diabetes. Historically, type 2 diabetes was an
illness that occurred in overweight middle aged people. Now it’s being seen in overweight
teenagers. Diabetes has a long list of complications associated with it and the longer you have
the illness, the more likely you are to develop complications.

The WHO predicts that diabetes (that’s type 1 which is genetic and type 2) will be the 7th
leading cause of death in 2030. In 2012 it was estimated that 1.5 million people die as a result
of diabetes.

The WHO also says that simple lifestyle measures have been shown to be effective in pre-
venting or delaying the onset of type 2 diabetes. That’s being active (30 minutes of regular
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activity on most days), maintaining a healthy body weight, eating a healthy diet with three to
five servings of fruit and vegetables, reducing sugar and saturated fats and not smoking.

The message is simple. Eat fruit and vegetables, not too much sugar or saturated fat and be
physically active. These are all achievable goals.

Long Term Problems of a Poor Diet

1. Obesity, Type 2 Diabetes and Heart Disease
Obesity and type 2 diabetes are a huge problem in adulthood. In the USA 30 % of adults are
obese (that’s more than just overweight.) Worldwide, obesity has doubled since 1980. It leads
to heart problems and stroke (the leading cause of death in 2012), diabetes, osteoarthritis (a
highly disabling degenerative disease of the joints) and some cancers. That’s a huge burden
of illness that can be avoided with changes in lifestyle.

The WHO says that “the fundamental cause of obesity and overweight is an energy imbal-
ance between calories consumed and calories expended”. Basically the message is that people
eat too much and don’t do enough exercise. It says that individuals should limit intake of
total fats and sugars, eat more fruit and vegetables, legumes, whole grains and nuts and do
some regular exercise.

The problem is, it’s very easy to say “eat healthily and do some exercise” but if you’re not in
the habit of doing so, then you need to change your habits. That can be tricky. When did
these overweight adults develop their eating habits? The answer is in childhood and they
continued them on into adulthood.

As parents, if we can develop healthy eating habits in our children early on, our children
won’t need to change them. They’ll just carry on eating healthily and doing some exercise.

2. Cancer
Everyone is scared of cancer and rightly so. It’s common and it’s awful. But did you know
that you can reduce your risk of getting cancer by 50% just by leading a healthy lifestyle.
Four in ten cancers are preventable by modifying your lifestyle. That’s eating healthily, doing
a moderate amount of exercise, not smoking, drinking alcohol in moderation and for moth-
ers, breastfeeding. In the UK, it is estimated that one in twenty cancers may be linked to not
enough fruit and vegetable intake.

Eating lots of fruit and vegetables has been linked to a lower risk of cancer of the mouth, food
pipe (oesophagus), lung, voice box (larynx) and some types of stomach cancer. It is thought
that nutrients such as carotenoids, folate, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, flavonoids and oth-
er types of chemicals found in plants (phytochemical) help reduce the risk of cancer by doing
things like mopping up harmful chemicals that can damage DNA, by protecting against
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DNA damage, helping repair DNA and by blocking the formation of cancer-causing chemic-
als.

Eating lots of red meat and processed meat can increase the risk of bowel cancer and possibly
stomach and pancreatic cancer. (That includes fresh meat, minced meat, frozen meat and pro-
cessed meat such as ham, bacon, salami and sausages.) Scientists aren’t sure why but there
are a few potential culprits. Red meats contain lots of a red pigment called haem which could
irritate or damage cells or help make harmful chemicals. It could also be that these meats
contain lots of nitrates and nitrites which are used to preserve processed meat. Nitrites can be
converted into cancer causing-chemicals (N-nitroso compounds or NOCs). When we cook
meat at high temperatures such as grilling or barbecuing cancer-causing chemicals called het-
erocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic amines (PCAs) are created.

White meat such as chicken or turkey is not associated with an increased risk of cancer. How-
ever, processed white meat such as turkey slices count as ‘processed meat’ and can increase
the risk of cancer.

Eating too much salt, or lots of foods high in salt has been linked with a higher risk of stom-
ach cancer.

Eating too much saturated fat may increase the risk of breast cancer.

Eating lots of fish may reduce the risk of bowel cancer by a third.

Cancer Research UK recommends that in order to reduce our risk of cancer we should have a
diet that:

● Includes lots of fruit and vegetables

● Is high in fibre (fruit, veggies, whole grain foods, pulses)

● Is low in red and processed meat, saturated fat and salt

● Includes lots of fish

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Relax! It’s about the Long Term
Consequences
I don’t want to scare you. I want you to be aware that healthy eating is an important issue. If
we can get our children to eat healthily, we can reduce their risk of lots of horrible diseases.

I hope you can see that it’s not about this individual meal that’s in front of you right now. It
doesn’t really matter whether or not they eat that particular pea or carrot. What we want is
that they start to enjoy vegetables and eat them willingly. What we want to do in instil
healthy habits into our children so that when they leave home, they will choose healthy food.
Once they’re used to eating healthily, they won’t think of it as ‘eating healthily’ it will just be
what they’re used to... it will just be ‘eating’.

Right now, while we’re training them, it’s much better for them to choose to eat a small
quantity of vegetables than it is to reluctantly eat a whole plate full of peas.

With that in mind, I want you to relax and let go of any stress that you have surrounding
your child’s diet. I’m not saying you should forget about it and do nothing. Of course you
have to think about it all the time. It’s just that it takes time to teach them and it takes time to
change habits. Think about it like teaching them to read or write. They don’t learn overnight.

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By reading this book and starting to think about it, you’ve taken the first step towards a
healthy diet.

Training Our Children to Enjoy Healthy

Food
So, our short term objectives aren’t actually that we get them to eat four pieces of carrot and
ten peas each night. Our objectives are that we train our children to ENJOY healthy food, to
be open to TRYING new food and to develop a good relationship with food which basically
boils down to understanding hunger and eating when we’re hungry and not eating when
we’re full up.

Our long term objectives are that our children eat a healthy diet and that they continue to eat
a healthy diet when they’ve grown up (and enjoy all those healthy benefits and reduced risk
of disease.) Hopefully they’ll pass on those eating habits to their children as well.

Take Home Message

It’s worth the effort teaching our children to eat healthily so that they can have a reduced risk
of lots of horrible diseases. Obviously, you can’t reduce the risk of anything to ‘no risk at all’
but we can do simple things like eating vegetables and a bit of exercise to significantly lower
the risk.

It may take a bit of time to change those habits (and it might actually be your own habits that
you need to change) but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Eat fruit and vegetables in conjunction with a balanced diet. Do a bit of exercise.

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Further Reading
WHO Obesity Rates

WHO Diabetes Rates

Cancer Research UK How Healthy Eating Could Reduce Cancer Risk

Cancer Research UK Preventable Cancers

Eating Fish May Reduce the Risk of Colon Cancer

Cancer Research UK Eat Healthily and Cut Your Risk of Cancer

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 What Is A Healthy Diet for
Children?

How Children Grow

Children are different from adults: they are growing.

A healthy diet for adults and children is similar but children aren’t little adults. The main dif-
ference is that they’re growing. In the first year of life they double or triple their birth weight.
At this time, most children don’t move that much and they often have those pudgy soft baby
cheeks that we all love kissing. Then they start to walk and run eventually that puppy fat
falls off.

After that their growth steadies off for a bit. At puberty they go through a ‘growth spurt’.
Girls go through that stage much earlier on, it marks the end of their puberty, so generally
somewhere between the ages of 12 and 14. They go through puberty, then do some growing
and then they stop growing. At this stage, around 15, you may well notice that most of the
girls in the class are taller than the boys.

The boys do their growing spurt later on, normally between 13 and 17. They grow for longer
and they normally end up taller. (Obviously that depends on many things including genetics
and illness.)

Children Need Lots of Energy

Children are growing and their bodies are learning and normally very active. I don’t know
about you, but my kids have a ‘sleep’ setting and a ‘running round’ setting and there isn’t
much in-between (unless of course I zap them with the television and then it’s like they’re
stunned and go into a sort of trance mode, one of the reasons that TV should be limited.)
They need lots of energy to do all this growing and learning.

Ideally they will get that energy from healthy, nutritious food. Children’s nutritional needs
are slightly different from adults in that they need less fibre (or at least young children do)
and they need more protein for all that growing that they’re doing. They also need some fat
and lots of energy, especially if they’re very active.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that children don’t need fibre at all, they do (and the ma-
jority of children don’t eat enough of it). It’s just that compared to adults, they need more of
certain things to grow. Having said that, it is important to get them prepared for an adult
diet…so they need to learn to eat and like vegetables!

What is Healthy Eating?

It’s more than just diet, which of course plays a large role. Normally for most children, that’s
eating enough fruit and vegetables and not eating too much processed food. Essentially that
boils down to home cooking. Healthy Eating is also having a good relationship with food.
Thinking about portion sizes is very important. Family meals are good and emotional eating
isn’t good. We’ll talk about all of these things in more detail.

If you eat sensibly, nothing is forbidden in moderation. But moderation is the key.

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 Food Groups
We can break food down into different groups. Obviously many foods have bits of different
groups but it’s important to know what food is made up of. There are fats, carbohydrates,
proteins, fibre, beans and legumes and ‘empty calories’ which aren’t exactly a group but
they’re good to know about.
Fats

What Fats Do
● Protect us

● Insulate us

● Are good for brain and nervous system

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 ● Help us feel full up

● Decrease the absorption of glucose.

We all need some fat in our diet.

Fats have been given a bad reputation in recent years but we do need them for insulation and
protection. If you think of your abdomen, or tummy, it doesn’t have lots of bones to protect it
like your ribs protect your chest. It has a layer of fat that protects all your internal organs.
Now some people have more ‘protection’ than others but that’s not what we’re aiming for.
Fats are also important in the development of your brain and nervous system. And they help
us feel full up. That’s called ‘satiety’. They give us a feeling of satiety and they decrease the
absorption of glucose.

Different Types of Fat

● Saturated: animal fats that are solid at room temperature

● Unsaturated: either naturally occurring oils or man made (trans fatty acids)

Fats can be broken down into two separate groups. Firstly there is the ‘saturated’ group. The
fatty acids are straight and flat and the fat is solid at room temperature. So that’s things like
butter and animal fat.

Then there is the ‘unsaturated’ group. The molecules in unsaturated fats are kinked and so
they are less dense, so either oil or squidgy like margarine. Unsaturated fats occur naturally
in plants, such as nuts, olives and avocados. These molecules are kinked and they are liquid
at room temperature.

Unsaturated fats can also be manmade, such as margarine. These manmade molecules are
kinked in a certain way and are called ‘trans fatty acids’. These have been around for a long
time but there are concerns that they are actually quite bad for you. They are used a lot in fast
food restaurants and in processed foods which we will look at later.

The concern with fats is that they increase your risk of heart disease but also they have been
linked with other illnesses. (Now the term ‘being linked’ is really medical talk for ‘we’re not
really sure but there’s lots of debate about it’…so we won’t go into it in too much detail.)

The reason for all this controversy is that the trans fats increase bad cholesterol but they also
decrease the good cholesterol that is in your body. Whereas saturated fats increase the bad
cholesterol but they also increase the good cholesterol. Historically we have been told to eat a
diet low in fats, especially saturated fats. The result being that most people ate a diet high in
carbohydrates. It is now clear that a high carbohydrate diet is not good for us. There is evid-
ence that saturated fats are not as bad for us as previously thought and that we can eat more
saturated fats than previously thought.

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Either way, children aren’t really part of the ‘high fat low fat’ discussion. Children need fat
and a low fat diet for children has never been advocated.

Focus on Naturally Unsaturated Fats

My advice is to focus on the naturally unsaturated fats, so that’s plants, nut and vegetable
oils and a bit of saturated fat in the form of butter or animal fat is fine. Actually, since we
moved to Spain, we’ve adopted their Mediterranean method of drizzling a bit of olive oil on
your bread. We really love it. You can get different strengths of olive oil and I usually use a
mild one for bread.

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Carbohydrates

What Carbohydrates do
● Provide us with energy

Carbohydrates are the energy we need to run our bodies.

They are found in grains, pasta, bread and also in vegetables such as potatoes, sweet potatoes
and bananas.

Carbohydrates are sugars. There are different types of sugar molecules. The simplest are
single molecules which are also called ‘monosaccharides’ which just means ‘single sugar’. Ex-
amples of monosaccharides are glucose, fructose and galactose. Glucose is also known as
dextrose. Fructose is found in fruit and galactose is found in milk. They are all single mo-
lecules and are absorbed quickly into your blood.

Carbohydrates that have two molecules are called ‘disaccharides’. That’s 2 of the single ones
joined together. Sucrose (or table sugar) is glucose and fructose joined together. Lactose is

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galactose and glucose. These double molecules are also absorbed quickly into the blood-
stream.

Then we have a complex molecule which is a chain of the single molecules which is known as
a ‘polysaccharide’ or starch. These are broken down into the single molecules in the body.

Too Much Carbohydrate

Now our bodies need carbohydrate, especially children who run around a lot, but if you eat
too much, it is generally stored as fat. As I mentioned above, a high carbohydrate diet al-
though previously advocated by governments, is no longer considered to be healthy, espe-
cially when those carbohydrates come in the form of lots of processed foods. Obviously, the
more energetic you are, the more you run around, the more energy you burn. Athletes will
typically eat more carbohydrates and protein than people who don’t do as much exercise.

Glycaemic Index or GI
You may have heard of the ‘glycaemic index’ which is a measure of how quickly your body
can break down a food and extract the glucose so that it gets into your bloodstream.

The reason this is important is that if the blood sugar level goes up quickly, our body reacts to
bring it down again. If it goes up very quickly, our body can overcompensate, making our
sugar levels lower and us feeling hungry.

We want to aim to eat foods with a low GI, i.e. foods that take a long time to get absorbed
into our bloodstream. Now, if you wanted you could look up the GI for every food that you
eat but essentially refined sugars like table sugar are absorbed quickly (BAD). Whereas if you
eat the same sugar in the form of an apple, it comes with its own fibre and other things that
the body needs to break down. So even though the sugar molecules are the same (fructose is
fructose whether it comes in an apple or in powder form), they are absorbed differently.

GI is particularly important for people who need to control their blood sugars closely (for ex-
ample, people with diabetes). For the rest of us, it is interesting but if we try to avoid refined
sugars and stick to fruit and vegetables, we should be fine.

35
Proteins

What Proteins Do
● Form your body.

● Transport things around the body

● Used in the immune system

● Help to distribute fluid correctly

Proteins are the building blocks of our body.

Proteins are what a lot of body such as muscle is made up of. They are also good for the im-
mune system and are used as transporters. They help to make sure fluid is distributed in the
right way.

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Proteins are found in animal products such as meat, fish and eggs. Proteins are also found in
vegetables such as soy, peas, lentils, garbanzo beans (or chick peas) and nuts.

Equally, if you eat too much they can be stored as fat (just to clarify, it’s the carbon skeleton of
the protein that is stored as fat, rather than the nitrogen bits which are excreted…for those of
you who have studied biology a bit.)

Essential Amino Acids

Our body can’t create nine amino acids, we have to get them from our diet.

Proteins are made up of amino acids and our bodies can make lots of amino acids. There are
nine amino acids that are called ‘essential amino acids’ that our bodies can’t make and that
we have to get in our diet.

A protein is known as a ‘complete protein’ when it contains all nine in sufficient quantities.
Sources of complete proteins are meat, fish, eggs and milk and plant sources are quinoa and
buckwheat. If you don’t eat meat, it doesn’t matter if you get the nine amino acids from dif-
ferent places. You can get some from one source and some from another and that’s fine.

Where should you get your protein from and how much should you eat? If you’re vegetarian,
clearly you don’t eat meat. If you’re not vegetarian, you don’t want to be eating too much red
meat as there are studies that link consuming a lot of red meat and processed meat with
bowel cancer. That includes all meat that is processed whether it’s red or not, so things like
turkey slices or chicken nuggets. UK recommends less than 70g (2.4 ounces) of red meat or
processed meat a day. That’s for an adult. That’s roughly half a pork chop OR 3 slices of thin
ham.

A good guide is to try to get your protein from a variety of sources, including vegetables,
(even if you’re not vegetarian), to eat seafood regularly (twice a week, with one portion being
oily fish) and just eat small amounts of red meat and processed meat.

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Fibre

What Fibre Does

● Prevents constipation

● Helps adult weight control

● Aids digestion

● Helps balance blood sugar levels

● Helps maintain blood pressure levels.

● Prevents bowel cancer and other cancers.

Fibre passes through us without being absorbed. It’s a really important part of a healthy diet that
many people overlook.

Fibre is found in vegetables, fruits, whole grains (that’s brown grains so brown bread and
brown pasta), as well as beans and nuts. This is where many people fall short and a lot of
38
people don’t even realise that they aren’t getting enough. Most people only get about half the
recommended daily amount of fibre. It’s good for adult weight control, for balancing blood
sugar levels, for digestion and blood pressure.

There are two different types of fibre. Soluble fibre is generally found in fruit, apples, lentils,
oats. It dissolves in the body and forms a gel. It helps to slow stomach emptying and helps us
to absorb less of the bad cholesterol.

Insoluble fibre doesn’t dissolve, it just passes right through you. It is known as a ‘bulking
agent’ and helps prevent constipation, which is a very common childhood complaint. It is
found in whole grains and vegetables.

You don’t need to worry too much about which fibre is which. Just eat lots of fruit and vegetables!

39
Beans and Legumes

Legumes are high in protein and fibre.

Beans and legumes are considered a ‘unique food’. They are high in protein and are often
considered a plant alternative to meat in terms of protein. They are also high in fibre so count
towards your vegetable consumption as well. They contain high levels of iron and zinc, po-
tassium and folate.

Just to clarify, that’s beans like chickpeas or garbanzo beans rather than green beans. Green
beans aren’t considered part of this group as they contain more starch than protein.

40
Dairy

What does Calcium does

● Contributes to strong healthy bones and teeth

Dairy products are high in calcium which is good for growing bones and teeth.

Dairy products come from milk but not all milk products are considered to be in the ‘Dairy
Food Group’ as they don’t have much calcium. Fluid products such as milk and yoghurt are
included, as well as some solid products, namely cheese. Soy milk is an alternative to animal
products.

Foods that have little calcium such as butter, cream and cream cheese are not considered part
of this group.

Generally they are made up of a mixture of protein, fat and carbohydrate. Cheese is very high
in fat but can also be a source of complete protein.

If you do not consume dairy products, you can get calcium from other sources such as al-
mond milk, rice milk, soy products and canned fish (the ones that contain the bones). Calci-

41
um is also added to some cereals and bread. Check the labels of your products to compare
calcium levels.

42
Empty Calories

Empty Calories are high in calories with little or no nutritional benefit.

‘Empty calories’ might sound good but are actually bad. All those foods that contain calories
but none or very few actual nutrients. A bit like eating a handful of sugar.

These are foods that are very high in sugar or solid fat. Examples, are ‘marshmallows’ made
mostly of glucose syrup and sugar (which is really sugar and another type of sugar). These
empty calories are often found in cakes, cookies, donuts and fizzy drinks.

The american government also classifies cheese as empty calories as it’s so high in fat. It does
contain protein, but it contains much more fat.

Empty calories can also be added, so for example, adding sugar to apple sauce is an example
of adding empty calories.

You don’t have to cut out empty calories completely. If you eat sensibly you can eat anything
in moderation. But being aware and recognising them is the important first step. When I say
‘cakes and cookies’ there can be a big difference in what goes into cakes, whether they are

43
shop bought or homemade. The point is we don’t want our children to be eating lots and lots
of empty calories. A diet that is based highly on empty calories is clearly not a good one.

44
45
Drinks

46
47
 Children over 1 should drink mostly water.

What we drink is important too. Children should be drinking mostly water.

All other drinks should be given in moderation. Even things like fruit juice, which is con-
sidered relatively healthy, should be served in moderation. They are very high in sugar
which isn’t great in itself but it’s also part of developing habits and getting into drinking
sweet drinks isn’t a good habit. If you serve a sweet drink with dinner, it alters the taste of
dinner, often making it less appealing for children.

If you do want to give fruit juice, you can dilute it and I would also recommend giving it in a
small cup rather than a large one. Unsugared fruit teas (without added sugar) are another op-
tion.

Milk
Under the age of one children should have breastmilk or formula. They can have cow's milk
on cereal or within food, but as a drink it should be breastmilk or formula (or water).

After one they can start to drink full fat cow’s milk as a drink but they shouldn’t be given
semi skimmed milk until they are two and fully skimmed milk until they are five. (In reality
full fat milk is fine for everyone over the age of 1.)

When you introduce your child to solid foods you should introduce them to water as a drink.
To begin with they will continue to get their nutrients from milk, but as they move away
from milk and get more nutrients from solid foods, they should move away from milk as a
drink and towards water. They do need to have some dairy and that can be in the form of
milk, yoghurt or cheese.

48
Proportions
Half of what we eat should be fruit and vegetables, slight more veggies than fruit.

Now we have all these food groups… fats, proteins, fibre, carbohydrates and dairy, we need
to work out how much of each we’re going to eat. There are many different types of diet and
people can argue until the cows come home which is the best for you. We’re going to go with
the basic… that’s simple healthy eating.

Each government in the developed world has advice for us. In the UK the recommendation is
five 80g portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Although recently a paper came out that said
seven portions was probably better. In Australia they recommend five of vegetables and two
of fruit and their portion sizes are bigger (100g).

In the USA they have something called My Plate which I really like as it looks at everything
that we eat rather than a bit of it. It’s very visual which I think makes it easier to understand.
They recommend that half of what you eat should be fruit and vegetables with a bit more ve-
getables than fruit. The other half is made up of grains which is basically your carbohydrate
group (although they count potatoes as vegetables rather than in the grains group) and pro-
tein. They recommend that half the grains you eat should be whole grain, that’s brown pasta
or rice. Then on the side they have a little bit extra which is dairy. So we should eat a bit of
dairy, but not too much.

What is Healthy Eating?

In a nutshell, this is what we are aiming for…

● More fruit and vegetables

● Less processed food

● More family meals

● Simple home cooking

● Sensible eating

● A good relationship with food (eating when we’re hungry, stopping when we’re full
and not eating for emotional reasons.)

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Further Reading
Does the consumption of caloric and non-caloric
beverages with a meal affect energy intake? (Appetite
2005 Vol 44 p187-193)
44 women ate lunch in a laboratory once a week for 6 weeks. They either had 360g beverage
(water, diet coke, coke, orange juice or 1% milk) or no beverage. They were allowed to eat
what they wanted. The women who drank the calorific beverages consumed more calories in
total but didn’t feel any fuller.

Take home message: Calorific beverages add to the total amount of calories consumed without
making you feel full up. Water is best!

50
51
 A Healthy Eating Routine
A healthy eating routine is the foundation of teaching your kids to eat a healthy diet.

Whatever problems you face, fussy eater, toddler, busy parent, nagging for snacks, your
healthy eating routine is how you are going to teach your kids to love healthy food.

Here’s the idea.

You offer your kids healthy food throughout the day, they either eat it or leave it.

Simple as that!

What does that look like?

Take my family as an example. We have breakfast, snack, lunch, snack and dinner.

The exact routine doesn’t matter so much but your kids should have the opportunity to eat
every few hours.

You provide them with food. You let them eat what they like and leave what they don’t want
to eat.

You don’t pressure them or persuade them to eat. You just offer the food.

Yep. At times that means they won’t eat anything.

It’s really difficult not to entice, cajole or bribe your kids.

Seriously I know.

You just have to get used to it. It’s tough but you need to learn to trust them. We need to
teach them to eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full.

What if They Don’t Eat?

You have several options.

You can just say “that’s fine!” If your child isn’t hungry, they don’t need to eat. They will
have another healthy eating opportunity in a few hours time.
Alternatively, if you think your child is hungry and they genuinely don’t like the food you
are offering, you can offer an alternative. My oldest child gets carrots sticks (and hummus if
he’s lucky) when he doesn’t like what is on offer.

You don’t want the alternative to be really exciting. You want the alliterative to be something
that is acceptable and healthy but not so great that they’d choose to eat it above other things.

If you find yourself becoming a “short order cook” and making different foods for each child,
you should think hard about allowing your child to go hungry. At least until the next healthy
eating opportunity.

Starting Your Healthy Eating Routine

If your current eating schedule is all over the place, full of packets and junk, you’ll want to go
“cold turkey”. To start with, you’ll have to be strict. You need to establish the rules.

You decide when and what to offer. Your kids decide if they want to eat and what they want
to eat, out of the options that are offered.

Sit down together for each meal or snack. Enjoy it together.

As your family gets used to their routine, you’ll find that you can be more flexible. You’ll still
be doing the same things, you just won’t think so much about it. It won’t matter so much if
snack is 15 minutes early or 10 minutes late.

Your kids will get used to the idea. Instead of asking straight after lunch “can I have a
snack?” They’ll know it’s not for a while and they’ll ask “what is for snack?”

53
 Portion Sizes

Portions are Bigger Than They Used to Be

Over the last few decades portions that we are served have got bigger and bigger.

They are bigger in restaurants, they are bigger in packets and more often than not they are
bigger in the home as well. Now, does this matter? Don’t we just eat what we want and then
stop? Well, sadly the answer to that it no. We don’t.

We are programmed to eat what is in front of us. Packaging and portion sizes play a large
role in the amount that we eat. The result is that people eat much more than they used to
which is clearly a contributing factor to the epidemic of obesity that we have in the devel-
oped world.
In last 20 years… the average portion of french fries has nearly tripled from 210 calories to
610. You need to walk for 1 hour 10 minutes to burn off those extra calories. Spaghetti and
meatballs, used to be 1 cup of spaghetti, 3 small meat balls. Now the average portion is 3
cups of spaghetti and 3 large meatballs, that’s 2 hours and 35 minutes of housework!

We Eat What We’re Served

In an ideal world, we would eat when we were hungry and stop when we were full. But
that’s not what happens. We eat what we are served, regardless of how much we are served.
This ‘portion distortion’ starts as early as three years old.

It’s not just the portion of food that is put in front of us. How it’s packaged affects how much
we eat as well. One study shows that people eat more from half-filled large packages than
they do from completely full, medium-sized bags – even when the bags contain the same
amount of food. The larger bag seems to encourage people to eat more.

As parents, it’s an interesting fact. As is this desire we have to ‘feed’ our children. Despite the
fact that children are much more likely to be overweight than to be undernourished, we still
have this desire to get calories into them. I suspect it’s an evolutionary thing left over from all
those years when food was a scarcity. Now however, we live in times of plenty.

How Much Food do our Children Need?

How much should our children be eating? Well, that depends on many things. Your child’s
age, sex, height and of course activity levels. But for an average two to three year old, this is
how much they should be eating in 24 hours (according to MyPlate.com)…1 cup of veget-
ables, 1 cup of fruit, 3 oz of grains, that’s 1 small biscuit, 1 slice of bread and half a cup of
cooked pasta) 2 oz of protein (that’s 1 egg and 1 slice of sandwich turkey OR a quarter of a
55
cup of chick peas (garbanzos) and half a hamburger) plus 2 cups of dairy (so 1 cup of milk
and 1 cup of yoghurt.) I know, I had to do a double take… that’s 1 small biscuit, not 1 packet
of small biscuits. And yes, that’s how much they need in a day, not one meal. It’s incredible
isn’t it?

You can find the amounts for different age groups on the website and if you want a more per-
sonalised amount, you can go to the link to MyPlate and put in your child’s height, weight
and activity level and it will calculate how much they need.

Now, I don’t want you to get worried if you think they eat too much. I suspect lots of chil-
dren do and the majority of them burn it off without any problems. But it’s important to be
aware of these facts so that we make sure that we don’t over feed them. Over eating is defin-
itely not a habit you want them to develop. If you think your child does overeat, then it’s bet-
ter to encourage them to eat more of the healthy things and less of the bad things, than to re-
strict the amount of food that they eat.

What Can We Do to Overcome this

Problem of Large Portion Sizes?
1. Serve Smaller Portions
Firstly, serve smaller portions. Then allow seconds if requested. If you have a child who you
think overeats, give them small portions and encourage them to eat a small amount of
everything. If they want seconds allow them to have seconds (preferably if they’ve eaten a
small amount of everything). If they ask for more, ask them to wait until everyone has fin-
ished, or for 10 minutes (whatever is appropriate). You might find that after that time, they
actually realise they aren’t hungry any more. If they have got down from the table and they
do want more, they need to come back to the table to eat it. Alternatively, you can tell them
they can have something from the fruit bowl.

2. Use Smaller Plates and Cups

Putting things in smaller containers or on smaller plates, makes it seem like there is more,
(like in the study we talked about earlier).

When you put the same amount of food on a small plate, the plate looks full. When you put it
on a large plate, the plate looks empty which makes you think you have less. The same is true
of drinks. A small glass of fruit juice in a full but small glass looks like you have lots. Put the
same amount in a tall glass, the glass looks only half full and you think you have less.

This works with packets as well, so instead of giving children free reign with a big packet,
serve the contents in a smaller packet. Take one large packet of crisps, and serve them in little

56
bowls, or boxes, or bags, whatever you like…but don’t let them have the large packet. You
can decorate your paper bags if you like with stickers or pictures.

3. Appropriate Portions
When we think about portions I also think it’s important to remember than little people don’t
need as much as big people. I know we want to be ‘fair’ and I think this is a big problem
when it comes to pudding. We tend to serve the same portion for everyone whether they’re
big or little…but actually it’s reasonable for older people and older children to have larger
portions than little children.

4. Don’t Encourage them to Eat Everything

Other things that we can do to overcome this problem of large portions is not to encourage
our children to eat everything…overcome The Evil Clean Plate Club. Allow them to stop
when they feel full. If you have young children, they may not understand what full is. My
children say their tummies hurt but they mean they’re full.

5. Eat a bit of Everything

Encourage children to eat a bit of everything in turn. Instead of eating all of their favourite
food and then leaving the vegetables. First a bit of chicken, then a bit of carrot, then a bit of
potato. You won’t be so upset that they haven’t eaten everything as you’ll know that they
have had some of everything.

6. Healthy Snacks and Food

Offer healthy snacks throughout the day and present them with healthy food. Obviously you
can overeat anything, but if you eat too much fruit and vegetables you’re overeating a lot less
than if you eat too much cake or biscuits.

57
Summary
● Small portions

● Small plates, cups, bowls

● Appropriate portions

● Out with Clean Plate…allow them to stop

● Eat a bit of everything rather than all of one thing

● Healthy snack and food.

58
59
 What the Kids Think

● Toddlers are fussy and they have a preference for sweet food.

● Some children grow out of fussiness, others don’t.

● Some fussiness is behavioural, some is a genuine dislike of food. Some is both.

● Children like routine and familiar things…they are averse to change and new things.

● You need to try something 10-15 times before you truly either accept it or reject it.

● It takes time to get used to new things.

● VARIETY is a great way to help children start to try new things.

Things that Affect whether a Child will eat
Something
● Hunger

● Mood

● Behaviour

● Likes and Dislikes

● Emotions

● Routine

● Family Dynamics

Things that Affect whether a Child Likes a

Food
● FAMILIARITY

● Colour

● Smell

● Presentation

● Taste

● Texture

Toddlers are Fussy!

It is normal for toddlers to be fussy. It’s important to continue to offer them a variety of food, even
if they don’t eat it. That way they become familiar with different foods rather than become restric-
ted to a narrow diet.

61
Let’s start by having a quick look at fussiness and pickiness and how it often starts when chil-
dren are toddlers.

Normally what happens with children is that parents introduce them to solids fairly easily. It
might take a bit of time to get used to but generally once they’ve got it they’ve got it. Next
comes parents' golden ‘honeymoon’ time of ‘child eating solids happily’. They’ll wolf down
anything you give them and they try all new things (that ‘mouthing’ reflex comes in handy…
they try to eat everything from wooden blocks to face cloths).

At this time children are really open to trying new things. Parents think they’ve nailed it.
However, what they’ve forgotten is that the ‘tyrant toddler’ is waiting around the corner.
Their lovely chirpy ‘obedient’ baby turns into a defiant toddler “You want me to put my shoe
on?” “I throw my shoe in your face!” (literally). They scream and shout and scream some
more, often for no apparent reason (believe me I know, I have two of them!) You think they
want a teddy, you give them the teddy. “NOOO!” they scream. “HOW DARE YOU GIVE ME
THE TEDDY!”

Is this sounding familiar to anyone?

It’s frustrating being a toddler.

You’re clearly giving your parent simple instructions on how you want things done, but they
don’t seem to be listening. Toddlers are starting to explore the world and become more inde-
pendent. They think they can do anything… scale the sofa, ride a bike, use a knife and fork.
They become frustrated when it doesn’t happen like that.

Amidst all this turmoil, and it is turmoil, for both the child and their parents who have to
work out how best to deal with them parents need to learn new coping strategies. Suddenly
there is defiant behaviour and parents need to work out what they’re going to do about it. So
amidst all of this, children’s feeding habits change. They stop being the good eaters that they
once were.

Most toddlers have a natural preference for sweet foods. (There is a theory that this is an evo-
lutionary survival tactic to stop them from eating poisons.) At this age they are put off by bit-
ter food.

They are also put off by new things. That’s new things in general, but also new foods and
new ways of eating. Texture is also important. Plus whether they actually have all their teeth.
However, even if they do have all their teeth, don’t expect them to relish chewing on a piece
of cabbage.

At this stage they stop growing so much and often don’t need so much to eat in reference to
their body weight. (Although their diet does tend to fluctuate from very little to three huge
bowls of pasta.)

They start throwing food all over the place and if they’re Sebastian (my youngest child) they
learn how to do raspberries to express their dislike of something. If you don’t give him EX-

62
ACTLY what it is he has asked for (albeit in his mind) he does what we call ‘melt down’ or
‘hulk out’. It’s as if you’ve told him you’re going to chop off his teddy’s head.

So parents learn to tread around this behaviour and they feed their toddler what they’ll eat.
Anything for a quiet life right? Please be clear that I’m in no way blaming parents for chil-
dren’s picky eating, I’m just describing a very common situation that many parents have
problems with. Now some children grow out of this phase and others carry on to become
‘picky eaters’ or ‘fussy eaters’. Sometimes it’s a behavioural problem and sometimes it’s an
eating problem and sometimes it’s a bit of both.

As far as toddlers are concerned, it’s entirely normal to be fussy to some extent. When I say
‘fussy to some extent’ that means entirely refusing to eat food or indeed a whole plate of
food. Shoving food away or throwing it on the floor are both normal toddler behaviour. It’s
their way of saying they don’t want the food.

As parents, we need to learn how to cope with this behaviour. Of course we don’t want our
children screaming and crying all the time but equally we don’t want to “give in to” them ei-
ther. We don’t want to teach them screaming and shouting is acceptable behaviour. We don’t
want to teach them that just eating pasta and nothing else is acceptable either.

What do Children Like?

63
Let’s start by looking at the situation from a child’s perspective.

Most young children like routine and familiar things.

They dislike change. To be fair, that can describe a lot of adults as well as children. It’s just
that our range of experience is much greater so there are many more things that we consider
familiar.

I remember giving a friend an artichoke once. When I was a kid we used to go to France on
holiday and we ate them there. So to me they’ve always been included on my ‘treat and excit-
ing’ food list. But she’d never had one before. She politely ate it, or a bit of it. But I know that
she didn’t really like it. To her it was a strange vegetable and she didn’t really want to try it,
she just did it to be polite. She didn’t like it because it wasn’t familiar.

It takes time for people to get used to new things and decide if they actually like something
or not. You need to be exposed to something 10 -15 times to decide that you really and truly
don’t like something. Plus if you have a negative experience, it might take longer.

They Like to be in Control

64
Anyhow, getting back to our children. They like to be in control right? They like things to be
done as they were before. “Last time we had yoghurt and mango we also had two biscuits”…
so we want two biscuits this time! (Sigh!)

They Like to Say “I Don’t Like it”

To be perfectly honest, they claim to ‘like’ things or ‘dislike’ things but most of the time they
don’t really know what the word actually means, they’re just copying us. Even if they did
know, they are prone to changing their mind, without any warning. Ever served a ‘favourite
meal’ only to discover than now it’s untouchable? Me too. If only they’d notify us of these
changes, it would make life a little easier!

Whether Something is Eaten or Not is a

Complex Business
What affects whether a child eats something or not is hugely complex. It’s not just ‘I’ll like it”
therefore I’ll eat it….If only!

Are they hungry? I know you know but if you give them healthy food after they’ve eaten a
packet of biscuits, they’re not going to eat much of the healthy dinner.

What mood are they in? Who knows what mood your toddler will be in! There are times
when my babies wake up from their nap screaming blue murder and sometimes they wake
up all giggles and smiling. There is no rhyme nor reason. When they’re screaming, I’m not
going to give them something ‘new and exciting’! (Actually most of the time I chuck them in
the buggy and start running around town!)

The behaviour of the child. How old they are, what their nature is like and even discipline
can play a role in whether a child will eat something or not.

Their ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’. Now these may be ‘true likes’ and ‘dislikes’ or ones that they tell
themselves. It doesn’t matter as the end result is the same. I remember when I was a child I
used to claim that I ‘was allergic to apple juice”. I have no idea why. I suspect I wasn’t too
keen on it, or hadn’t had it much. It was one of those things I told myself, so I didn’t drink
apple juice. If you keep telling yourself you don’t like something, you’re likely to end up not
liking it.

Emotions. Are they sitting comfortably on mummy’s lap in a familiar surrounding such that
they eventually feel comfortable enough to try something new (or even something that isn’t
new but had previously offended them?) Or are they with a group of strangers who they find
intimidating in a strange and foreign place?

65
Routine. This is so important to children. And again, not just children. Adults like routine
too. We eat breakfast because it’s breakfast time. We eat lunch at lunch time and dinner at
dinner time. I know there are people who have erratic schedules, but your tummy definitely
prefers routine. Some (read my) children take this a step further. We eat breakfast food at
breakfast time, lunch food at lunch time and dinner food at dinner time. Don’t mess with the
routine!

Lastly and hugely importantly there is what I’ve called ‘family dynamics’ which basically
means parents reaction to the situation and how it affects your children, as well as how dif-
ferent children react to their parents. We’ll look at parental behaviour in the next chapter.
Family dynamics are very complicated. Your attitude to food and eating can play a huge role
in the message that you convey to your children. Your attitude to food may well be influ-
enced by your childhood and how food was presented to you in the past.

And the Food

OK, ALL of that and we haven’t even decided what’s on our plate! The actual food is quite
important too. What affects whether a child will eat the actual food or not?

You know what the really big decider is? Familiarity. I’m putting this first as it’s so import-
ant. Children will often have made up their minds they don’t like something before they’ve
even seen it. What is that? I have no idea. I don’t want to eat it. This I think is something that
drives parents to despair and leads us to restrict what we offer to our children. We know
they’ll make a fuss and how do we avoid that? We serve them something we know (or hope)
they’ll like.

Familiarity goes hand in hand with ‘preferences’. The things we like or think we like. Our
pre-conceived ideas about the food. When your child has decided that they ‘like’ or ‘don’t
like’ something you’ve got a whole extra battle to fight. Before you’ve even got dinner out of
the oven, they’re chattering away about how they “don’t like’ it…They’ve already talked
themselves out of it and they haven’t even seen it.

Instead of talking about liking and disliking you can talk about ‘feeling’ like something and
‘not feeling like something’. I know, I have some children who never feel like eating bananas,
but you can see the point I’m trying to make. If you can take away one small barrier, it’s
worth doing. Whenever possible, I try to avoid the word “like” and use other words instead.

What does the Food Look Like?

Let’s have a look at the actual food…How does it look? A carrot is a carrot right? Not to chil-
dren…there are carrot sticks, grated carrot, carrot coins.

What colour is it? What does it smell like? This is all before we’ve put it in our mouths.
Presentation is important to us all. Why do we pay so much to eat in posh restaurants? Be-

66
cause the food is good? Yes, but also because they present it beautifully. Nice tasty food that
was just dumped on a plate would be a top end canteen, not a classy restaurant. Ever
watched Masterchef? It’s not just about taste, it’s about presentation as well.

For our kids, that can mean a whole host of things. It depends how far you want to go. But
it’s an important thing to consider. From simple things like putting raisins in boxes to making
your food fun and exciting. There are some beautiful things that people do, but you can do
simple things as well.

If we’re lucky, they’ll put the food in their mouths. How does it taste? What does it feel like?
Texture is another big thing. Not just woody and chewy like cabbage, but things like ‘slimy’
can be very off putting. Texture can affect children in different ways, it depends how sensitive
they are to it.

There are different reasons why children are averse to different textures. Part of it is normal.
It takes time to get used to woody and chewy and I wouldn’t expect young children or babies
to enjoy eating lettuce or cabbage, mostly because the texture is so difficult. Young children
have delicate mouths and not very many teeth, not a great combination for chewing tough
things. Often the question of texture is to do with familiarity as well and when we’re introdu-
cing babies to solids, it’s important that we give them textured food as well. There is a win-
dow of opportunity when they are young to introduce textures and if you don’t do it, it can
be an uphill battle.

So Here is What I Know…

● Children can’t eat what they haven’t been presented with….that’s to say, if you don’t
give it to them, they definitely won’t eat it.

● It takes 10 -15 times of being exposed to something for it to become familiar (and pos-
sibly disliked but that’s ok.)

● Children like familiar things

● They don’t like unfamiliar things

● We end up presenting them with the same food and then get upset when they won’t
eat new things.

● ‘Accepted’ things in a new style may count as something new.

Last night we had carbonara, a firm family favourite. I also served a bit of cabbage but as
there wasn’t much I did some grated carrots, cooked in a bit of butter…really tasty SWEET
carrots. Carrots are generally on the ‘accepted’ list… but that’s carrot sticks or carrots in
something else… not ‘on the side’. My six year old took one look at it and complained. Not
only did he complain about the carrots, but the whole meal. “I don’t want it!” he wailed, even

67
though it’s one of his favourite meals. The toddlers however, just ate theirs without com-
plaint.

What Can We Do?

● Offer Variety.

● Be Patient.

So what is the solution to this problem? To offer more variety and get more things on the ‘fa-
miliar and accepted’ list. We’ve seen how kids can be very rigid and structured and like
things to be the same as before. Research shows that the more variety children have, the more
likely they are to try new things. In reality, most people add a bit of variety, but mostly at din-
ner time.

Try to offer as much variety as you can throughout the week. Different things for breakfast,
different things for lunch, different things for snack and different things for dinner. It’s not
easy but the more variety you offer, the more variety they will eat and the more open they
will be to trying new foods.

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Further Reading
Bits and pieces. Food texture influences food acceptance
in young children. (Appetite Vol 84 p181-187)
They fed some well like yoghurt to 32 young children (32-48 months). They varied either the
texture, colour or taste. They found that texture affected whether children would eat the
yoghurt much more than taste or colour.

Take home message. Texture is really important to young children.

Overcoming picky eating. Eating enjoyment as a central

aspect of children’s eating behaviours. (Appetite Vol 58
p567- 574)
A questionnaire of 305 parents of 5-12 year olds. They looked at restricting foods, enjoyment
of eating and cooking with children. They conclude that eating enjoyment is an important as-
pect of picky eating behaviour. Pressure decreases eating enjoyment. Cooking with children
can increase eating enjoyment and decrease picky eating.

Take home message. Putting pressure on kids is bad. Cooking with them is good.

69
70
What the Adults Do
72
 ● Pressurising children to eat leads to them not wanting to eat.

● Try giving children smaller portions sizes.

● Rewarding behaviour with food can have negative consequences.

● We want to teach our children to have a good relationship with food: to eat when they are
hungry, to stop when they are full and not to do ‘emotional eating’.

● Labelling children is a self fulfilling prophecy.

Encourage a Good Food Relationship

● No pressure

● Lead by example (i.e. eating and enjoying a healthy diet ourselves)

● Learn about hunger (when appropriate)

● Talk about food in a positive way (with a specific food stress taste over health benefits)

● Eat a bit of everything before you eat all of one thing

● Give children some control (structure choices)

● Have a strategy (avoid negotiation)

● Division of Responsibility

We End Up Pressurising Our Children

It’s really easy to put pressure on our children without even realising it.

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Let’s have a look at the situation from the parents point of view and see how our behaviour
might be modelling our child’s eating habits in a negative way. Most parents want what is
best for their children and the majority of parents find their children frustrating to a larger or
lesser degree. We want our children to do as they’re told peacefully and happily and appreci-
ate that we know what’s best for them. Except the kids have different ideas and parents end
up getting frustrated trying to get them to do what they’re told in any form at all, let alone
‘peacefully and happily”.

We end up putting pressure on our kids. “You can have pudding when you’ve finished your
vegetables” or “just two more mouthfuls and then you can go and play”. I know I do it and
so does my husband. If we’re honest, I suspect we all do it in some way or other. It’s just re-
cognising it.

There is a lot of research that says that if you pressure children into eating things, they’re less
likely to eat it. I suspect most people know it deep down. How do you feel when someone
tells you you have to do something? Generally we don’t say “oh yes, great, I was looking for
someone to tell me what to do!” Our normal reaction is to want to do the opposite and we
think “who are you to tell me what to do?” My husband is always complaining that I nag
him too much… it’s just the same. He doesn’t like being told what to do (and I haven’t
worked out how to get him to do those things without telling him!) Kids are just the same.
Probably worse!

Why Do We Put Pressure on Our

Children?
Why do we put pressure on our children? We need to be honest with ourselves here. Are we
worried they’ll be hungry? Do we want to avoid conflict? That’s a big one for me. With four
young children mealtimes can be quite noisy and I’m always trying to keep the peace. Are
you worried that they won’t sleep because they’re hungry? Or that they’ll wake up in the
night? Are you frustrated that they won’t do what they’re told? This is another one that I see
in my house. It’s not just about the meal, it’s about behaviour and discipline beyond the
table. If children don’t do as they’re told at meal times, what hope have we got for the rest of
the day? Lastly what about constipation?

These reasons will be different for each of us. It’s interesting to take a moment to reflect but in
a way it doesn’t really matter because we’re going to stop doing it. I know it’s difficult to
stop. As with every habit, it’s difficult to change but once it’s changed, it’s easier to maintain.

What Will Happen if Children Don’t Eat?

But what’s the worst that is going to happen if they don’t eat one meal?

74
They’ll be hungry, at least until the next meal or snack time when they’ll be offered another
healthy something to eat.

Moderate hunger isn’t to be feared and it’s probably part of learning the lesson that when
you’re hungry you eat and when you’re full you stop. If you don’t eat, you get hungry.

What we don’t want to do is teach our children that if they complain or don’t eat the healthy
food they are rewarded with cookies and treats.

Avoid Putting Pressure on Your Children

My Golden Rule number 1! DON’T PRESSURE YOUR CHILDREN TO EAT.

Don’t pressure your children into eating. Out with the clean plate club, out with “two more
bites”. In short, don’t nag your child to eat more (however nicely you ask or plead or encour-
age… be aware of what you’re doing and stop!)

I know that this is a difficult thing to think about. People ask “but can I encourage my child
to eat at all?” This is a difficult question and I think the bottom line is that if you’re not sure,
then don’t. Mealtimes are a combination of behaviour and eating. Jumping around on your
chair is a behaviour issue rather than an eating one. Clearly behavioural issues impact on eat-
ing. If you’re not sure, try to focus on their behaviour rather than their eating. If eating is a
problem then allow them to have bad manners, or rather let the food be the priority. Getting
upset about their manners will have an impact on the meal, everyone’s enjoyment of the
meal and their eating.

Give Smaller Portions

If this is an area that you struggle with then try giving smaller portion sizes. That way,
they’re more likely to eat it and you’ll feel better. If they ask for seconds, then that’s fine. If
it’s a new food that you want them to try…just try, then give them a tiny tiny bit. Start with a
small goal and move up.

Avoid Rewarding Behaviour with Food

(including Dessert)
Equally, rewarding behaviour with food is a no-no.

So “if you’re good you can have a cookie”. Sounds harmless enough doesn’t it? I know that
I’ve done it before. But research shows that modifying behaviour with eating can carry on

75
into adult life. Adults whose behaviour was modified by eating as children are more likely to
binge eat and go on diets, rather than just eating sensibly. Another study showed that people
were more likely to be bulimic.

The most common example of this is “you have to eat all your dinner to get your pudding’.
This is a double-whammy NO NO! Firstly you’re pressurising children and secondly you’re
using food as a reward. The message that you’re giving is that the main course is food that
has to be endured to get to the reward of pudding. The message you want to give is that din-
ner is enjoyable, tasty food and so is dessert but that dessert is a treat. Learning that some
foods are treats is fine.

To me it’s about being sensible and being aware of our relationship with food. So using food
as bribery is part of emotional eating and if we think about it, we know that’s not great. I
think we need to be realistic and aware that in society eating and drinking is tied up with
emotions. Parties and celebrations are all part of eating that is tied up in emotions, but what
we don’t want to do is eat to make ourselves feel better emotionally. That typical movie scene
of ‘just broken up with boyfriend’… eats three tubs of ice cream. That’s not having a good re-
lationship with eating and we don’t want to pass that onto our children. To me this is a diffi-
cult line to tread. We definitely go out for ice creams for treats but I think it’s better to look for
other rewards in general and let that just be a treat rather than a reward. So look for other re-
wards, rather than food.

Avoid Labelling your Child

Do you consider your child to be ‘picky’ or ‘good’ or ‘naughty’? These are all examples of
how we label our children. Our expectations of our children are reinforced by these labels.
We see what we expect to see and labelling children gives a message not just to the child but
to everyone. You give them a role and they learn to play it and we learn to see it. (You know
that presumption that “Tommy must have spilt his milk because he’s clumsy?”…even though
you didn’t actually see it…that’s you expecting to see a certain behaviour.)

Try not to see your child as ‘picky’ or ‘fussy’ (or anything negative.) Focus on the good and
reinforce that. (If you have more than one child, try to distribute your verbal rewards evenly.
The absence of a verbal reward can still be felt negatively if you’re the child who doesn’t re-
ceive it so often.)

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How can we Encourage a Good Food
Relationship?

What can we do to encourage our children, to shape their relationship with food in a positive
way?

● Lead by example.

● Think carefully about the way we talk about food

● Establish a strategy or house rules

● Give structured choices

Leading by Example is hugely underestimated. It’s obvious that if we don’t eat a certain
food, our kids aren’t likely to eat it either. Equally, if we don’t have a healthy diet, there’s
much less chance of them eating a healthy diet. It goes beyond that. The way that we talk
about food is really important.

Be Positive When we Talk about Food and Eating, it’s important to be positive rather than
negative. Encourage good behaviour… ”well done you tried a grain of rice!” rather than
“you haven’t eaten all your peas.” Getting your children to describe food (without saying “I

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don’t like it”) is a great way to talk about food. (We’ll talk more about that when we talk
about introducing new food.) Talking about taste and texture.

We can also talk about food in general terms and this depends on the age of your children. If
they are old enough, you might find that they are actually interested in what is good for us
and why, especially if they can see the consequences of a bad diet. Obviously this has to be
handled delicately but for example there is a little girl in my son’s class who is very over-
weight and I’ve talked to him when he asks about her…when we chat, he tells me that she
can’t join in in the playground because she can’t run fast like the other children and that she
says her parents give her lots of sweets. That’s coming from a six year old. Personally I find it
heartbreaking.

I’ve also talked to my son about why some children have black teeth and why it’s important
not to eat too many sweets and to brush your teeth. Clearly it’s important to teach our chil-
dren not to be mean to other children, or bully them, especially when they see other children
doing it. But we can still talk about it in an honest and sensitive way.

If you don’t want to talk about specific people, you can talk in general terms about how
healthy eating helps you do the things that you like doing…so being strong enough to play
football, go swimming, dancing, whatever it is that your children enjoy doing. But be careful
to talk in general terms…not “eat your peas so that you can swim fast”…that is putting pres-
sure on them. The idea is that they get to understand. It won’t sink in straight away and even
if it does, they’ll still want sweets but it’s a great idea to explain things to them.

Now some children are too young, or not interested in the health benefits of food and that’s
fine. You can still talk to them in general terms. You can talk about eating variety…we eat a
bit of everything (rather than just pasta or bread) we eat lots of fruit and vegetables…we eat
when we’re hungry and stop when we’re full. In simple terms, those are the rules that we’re
trying to apply and even young children will begin to understand them.

As I mentioned earlier, I think the word “like” is quite an overused word. Children often use
it to mean “I don’t want to eat it” and they say “I don’t like it”… and what happens? That
whole food item becomes labelled as “unliked” and then avoided by both parents who are
scared to present them with something “unliked” and children who have it in their minds
that they don’t like it! My children often eat food that they “don’t like” in those moments
when they forget what they like and don’t like. Tthey can have genuine likes and dislikes.
My two year old won’t touch bananas and he never has. I would advise replacing the word
“like” with something along the lines of “I don’t feel like eating it now”. Or however, you
prefer to phrase it.

Give Children some Control

We have talked about how children, like everyone, like to feel in control. How about giving
them choices?

78
If you ask my children what they want for dinner, one of them invariably says ‘spaghetti bo-
lognese’ the other ‘mussels’ (I really should buy mussels more often, given that one of them is
always asking for them!). But I don’t want them to eat spaghetti every night. So I don’t ask.

However, it is possible to give them control in other ways. For example, a choice between
two things. Would you like salad or cabbage with your dinner. Would you like risotto or
spanish rice? Or if they always want spaghetti bolognese, they get to choose one day a week.
Or you can have a rota when it’s ‘Kid’s choice’. Offer them choices that you’re happy to stick
to, but be firm. Don’t let them persuade you into beloved carrots if you’ve offered cabbage or
salad.

You can also give them control over things that aren’t food… where they sit, what bowl they
use, what cutlery they use. It’s up to you but ‘closed choices’ rather than ‘open choices’ are a
good way to give them some control without giving them free reign to eat cheddar cheese
sandwiches with ‘daddy’s mustard’ everyday. (A great example of how children copy our be-
haviour, my children have developed a taste for their dad’s english mustard even though it’s
ridiculously strong.)

Set Boundaries.
What happens when you go to a party? When treat food is unlimited? I don't know about
you, but my children gobble up as much as possible of the treat 'forbidden' food. It's so frus-
trating. I work really hard to feed them a healthy diet and instil healthy values in them and
when they have the opportunity they gorge themselves on sweets.

Research shows that children who have set boundaries are more likely to eat healthily. So
perhaps, "you can have 2 slices of cake at the party and 5 sweets". Or whatever you'd like for
your boundaries. But without boundaries, children will eat until they feel sick. Or at least
mine do.

It's a good idea to have boundaries regarding all treat food. It's good that our children learn
that some food is 'treat' food. It's ok to eat it, but we need to eat it in moderation.

Have a Strategy
Our ‘strategy’ is basically your house rules. I know no one really likes rules but they do help
children know what is expected of them. It helps us to avoid negotiation. Eating is tied up
with behaviour and often at the dinner time, it can be a question of behaviour rather than an
eating problem. When my children say “yuck I don’t want it”, even before they’ve seen it, or
fight over a seat or a bowl…that’s not a food issue, that’s a behaviour issue…but it impacts
on mealtimes and therefore on eating.

Your ‘strategy’ is the rules that you set so your children know what to expect. Now you can
incorporate choices here, but make them choices that you’re happy to live up to. My children

79
used to make a huge great fuss about wanting a yellow plastic cup so that I had to go and
fetch more plastic cups…until I said “no…enough you can have whatever cup you’re given”
and now there is no more fuss. They know the rules.

Your strategy should include how you cope with bad behaviour. There are lots of different
ways to discipline your children. There are lots of different behaviours that parents consider
either acceptable or unacceptable. Having a strategy means that you know what you’re going
to do. Life is much easier when you know what you’re going to do it rather than ‘wing it’ and
see what happens. It’s easier for parents and it’s easier for children who learn what is expec-
ted of them. It’s not fair on them to treat the same behaviour inconsistently. One day they’re
allowed to jump down without asking, the next day they get told off. Inconsistency makes
them confused.

I would suggest that a good house rule is that if you can’t say something positive about the
food you’re served then don’t say anything. (Which in our house is the “you’re not allowed
to say ‘yuck’ rule.) Once one person starts complaining and making negative comments, you
will quickly find others joining in.

Some things that you might want to decide on:

● Seating arrangements. Do they have to sit at the same place each time, or are they al-
lowed to change? (And if so, how do you decide who gets to sit where.)

● What is your policy on second helpings? Do they have to have a bit of everything? Or
can they just have the bits they like? Do they have to eat a small amount of
everything before they’re allowed seconds (without pressuring!)

● Do they have to ask before they can get down?

● Are rude comments forbidden?

● What do you do when they misbehave?

● Treats

Division of Responsibility
The relationship with food and our children that we are aiming for can be summarised by the
Division of Responsibility. The Division of Responsibility is a term that has been coined by
Ellyn Satter who is a paediatric nutritionist.

She says that adults should be responsible for what we offer children. So what we offer them,
where and when. Children should be responsible for whether they eat and how much.

Adults need to choose and prepare food, provide regular meal times and snacks, make eating
times pleasant, show children what they have to learn about food and mealtimes and to be

80
considerate of their inexperience without catering to likes and dislikes. Lastly to not let them
have drinks in between meals other than water.

Children’s eating jobs are to eat. They will eat how much they need. They also have to learn
to behave at meal times.

I think this division is very true but we do need to remind ourselves about it from time to
time. When my kids don’t want to eat anything, I find it really difficult. I have to learn to
trust them which isn’t always easy. When we look at snacks, we’ll see that actually if we offer
healthy snacks throughout the day the next healthy eating time isn’t that far away. (Person-
ally I find that it’s when we have unexpected sweets and cakes that problems arise.)

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So let’s just Recap…
Here is how parents can encourage children to eat healthily…before we even get to the eating
bit.

● No pressure

● Talking positively and rewarding good behaviour

● Talking generally (in a positive way)

● Avoid labelling your child

● Avoid the word “like”

● Leading by example (I.e. eating and enjoying a healthy diet ourselves)

● Giving structured choices

● Knowing our strategy

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Further Reading
Preschoolers Eat Healthily When Parents Set the Rules
About Food. (University of Buffalo.)
Preschoolers whose parents have rules about what their children can and cannot eat have
healthier eating habits than those raised without such rules. Soda was found to be particu-
larly bad if parents had no rules.

Take home message: Set rules…how much pudding, how much you can eat at parties and treats,
how many treats you can eat.

Not as easy as pie. Disentangling the theoretical and

applied components of children's health knowledge.
(Appetite Vol 56 p 265-268)
Children aged four who accurately identify the relative health of foods and activities are
more likely to be able to select foods and activities that promote their body's health.

Take home message: Talking about healthy foods helps children understand which foods are
healthy.

“You Will Eat All of That!”: A retrospective analysis of

forced consumption episodes. (Appetite 2002 Vol 38
p211-219)
A survey of 407 college students who recalled if they had been forced to eat something in
childhood.72% said that they wouldn’t willingly eat the target food today.

Take home message: Forcing children to eat things can lead to them not wanting to eat them.

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The benefits of authoritative feeding style: caregiver
feeding styles and children's food consumption patterns.
(Appetite 2005 Vol 44 p243-249)
Questionnaires were given to 231 caregivers. The aim was to look at authoritarian and au-
thoritative parenting styles and various aspect of children’s food consumption patterns. Par-
ents who had an authoritative parenting style (setting limits, reasoning with children and be-
ing responsive to their emotional needs) made attempts to get the child to eat dairy, fruit and
vegetables and resulted in consumption of fruit and vegetables. With authoritarian parenting
(little nurture, lots of control) they were less likely to eat diary, fruit and vegetables.

Take home message. An authoritative parenting style leads to more fruit and vegetable consump-
tion. Again, pressure is not good.

If you are good you can have a cookie: How memories of

childhood food rules link to adult eating behaviours.
(Eating Behaviors 2003 Vol 4 p 283-293).
122 adults were asked about their childhood with regards to food rules, either restricting
foods, encouraging foods or using food to reward or punish behaviour. They also looked at
current eating patterns and found that those who remember their parents using food to con-
trol their behaviour where more likely to binge eat and restrict food.

Take home message. Using food as a reward or punishment can have lasting negative effects.

From the Garden of Eden to the land of plenty:

Restriction of fruit and sweets intake leads to increased
fruit and sweets consumption in children. (Appetite 2008
Vol 51 p 570-575)
Children were forbidden to eat either fruit or sweets or neither to see if it changed their de-
sire for them. The children who were forbidden sweets had a high desire for them whereas
the children who were allowed sweets or forbidden fruit didn’t have a high desire for them.
Forbidding fruit did not increase the desire for fruit. However, both groups ate more during
the taste session.

Take home message. Restricting food (other than fruit) may lead them to be desired more (and
eaten more when given the chance.)

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‘Finish your soup’: Counterproductive effects of
pressuring children to eat on intake and affect. (Appetite
2006 Vol 46 p 318-323.)
Preschool children were pressured to eat by a request to finish their food. Children consumed
significantly more food when they were not pressured to eat and they made less negative
comments.

Take home message. Pressuring your children to eat can lead them to eat less.

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86
Introducing New Foods
88
● Variety

● Exposure, exposure, exposure

● Talk about it

● Exciting names

● Presentation

● Prediction game

● Not just the new food, have something you know they’ll eat, but not always ‘preferred’
food

● Have a ‘back up’ a simple, nutritious, easy to prepare food, NOT a preferred food. Try to
use the same. Don’t give a choice. Or serve a nutritious pudding.

● Food pairing

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Introducing new foods to children can be so stressful that parents steer away from doing it.
You can just plonk some new food in front of your children and hope for the best... but what
normally happens? It gets shoved away, there are complaints and sometimes they even refuse
to eat their normal desired food that has been ‘contaminated’.

“Just try!” we say.

They refuse.

“How do you know you don’t like it if you don’t even try it??”

They refuse…

”Just a tiny mouth full, just put in your mouth, just touch it with your finger…your little toe,
you can wear a glove, seriously, it isn’t going to turn into a monster and eat you…
ARGH….JUST TRY IT!” ….

We aren’t going to win are we?

This aversion to trying new foods has a posh name… ’food neophobia’… which means being
scared of trying new foods. It is thought that it has developed to stop children from eating
poisonous things. Its effect is mostly strongly seen among two to six year olds (some experts
say thirteen years rather than six). Gradually as you get older, the effect wears off and you
become more open to eating new things. There are biological factors that can affect how
strongly the effect is expressed. That is to say some people are more neophobic than others.
Even some adults have food neophobia. It sometimes comes back again in old age too.

Your personality will also affect how food neophobic you are. If you are a ‘sensation seeker’
you are more like to want to try new things. If you an anxious person, you are less likely to
want to try new foods.

One of the things that can make food neophobia worse and lead children to refuse to try new
foods is a feeling of disgust at the food (especially after the age of four). Feelings of disgust
and thinking that the food is bitter are tied up together.

Normally as children become more familiar with a food, they are more likely to try it. How-
ever, if they have had a particularly negative experience with that food, especially at the be-
ginning of being exposed to it, the food neophobia will be reinforced. That’s to say, even
worse. So it’s important to avoid negative experiences and to try to make trying new foods
fun and exciting. And remember, if your child has had a bad experience, it will take longer
for them to accept the food. You will have to be especially patient.

And need I say it? Yes, pressurising your children into eating a food they don’t want to may
be the negative experience that reinforces the food neophobia.

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Bite size stories
Bad experiences can lead to food aversion.

When Galen, my oldest son was around 18 months old, he was beginning to enjoy eating fish.
One day we went to a friend's house and he ate some really lovely pink plums. For dinner he
had mackerel (aka 'fish biscuits'… he was an Octonauts fan). Disaster struck! That night he
vomited. Poor baby. He vomited a horrible pink fishy vomit.

After that, he was never willing to try fish. Even now at the age of six, he's still not keen on
fish. We have fish frequently and sometimes he'll eat it. He's recently taken to eating sardines
but he's definitely not a fish lover. We're sticking with him and gently encouraging him.

My daughter Celeste, now aged two had a similar experience with chocolate. It was the end
of the school term and we bundled everyone into the car at lunch time to drive the four hours
to grandma's in France for the Christmas holidays. Everyone was happily eating lunch and
had been given chocolate as a Christmas present by school and nursery. There were lots of
chocolate covered faces and sticky fingers. Poor Celeste was sick about five times on the jour-
ney up. I thought it was car sick but a few days later, when I started vomiting, I realised that
we had 'another bug from nursery'.

Since then she's hasn't touched chocolate. I know! A child who won't eat chocolate.

It just goes to show that a bad experience can really affect your enjoyment of something, es-
pecially if you're a child.

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How can we increase our chances of
success?

Variety
We’ve already talked about variety, but it’s still very important. Children who are exposed to
more variety are more likely to eat new foods. Remember to children different things can be
different depending on the presentation of the same food. Stuff that we consider to be the
same, they consider to be different. One mother told me that she was amazed that her chil-
dren ate cut up banana when they wouldn’t eat a whole one. It can work both ways for you…
the other night, my children refused to eat grated carrots instead of cut up ones. So try to of-
fer as much variety as possible.

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Exposure

We’ve talked about how children, like adults, like familiar things and aren’t keen on new
things. Well, what is familiar? Yes, I know we want them to eat it, but if it’s something that
they’ve seen around and never actually tried, it’s still more familiar than something they’ve
never seen before. Exposure can come in many forms… even seeing pictures of new things
counts as exposure. (There was a study that looked at nursery school children and the ones
that had seen pictures of strange vegetables were more likely to eat them than the others who
hadn’t.)

You know how you were always told not to play with your food? Well, actually it’s a great
idea, especially for children who are more sensitive to sensory stimuli than others. There are
so many things that you can do. You can play with food, so practise counting, putting things
into different colours, or finding things at the supermarket that begin with different letters.
Try to buy a strange fruit or vegetable every week. Or give you kids a selection of cut up fruit
and some toothpicks so that they can make a structure… or you can do the same on your
plate and just make a picture. The world is your oyster… but exposure to food is great, espe-
cially when there is no pressure to eat it. It’s just playing with it… if they ask to try it, that’s
fine, but the idea is to get used to rather than to try it.

Just to be clear, when I talk about being exposed to something 10-15 times before it’s properly
accepted or rejected, that’s actually eating it and trying it. Exposure in general is a good idea
as it’s more likely to lead to a taste exposure, but just seeing a picture of a pumpkin doesn’t
count as trying it.

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Presenting the new food

So now, we want to actually present our children with some new food and we want them to
actually try it…here are some things that I recommend we do…

● Don’t expect it to be eaten….have a back up plan

● Have other people about

● Talk about it

● Play the prediction game

● Give them a small amount

● Be prepared for refusal

● Allow them to spit it out

● Food pairing

● Keep doing it!

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Don’t expect them to eat it
Remember 10-15 taste exposures to get used to a new food. So the first time you present it to
them, are they going to like it? Chances are NO, they’re not. (Sometimes you’re lucky.) You
have another 14 times to go before they’re going to make up their mind about it. Before that?
Rejected as ‘unknown’.

So don’t depend on your new exciting food for the entire meal. You have several options
here. You can offer the new food on the side, as an extra so that they have something else that
they will eat. Or if it is the whole meal, you can have a ‘back up meal’ or a healthy dessert.

Back up plan
A back up meal is something that is easy, that you don’t have to cook, that is the same each
time, that you know they’ll eat, but importantly is NOT on their ‘preferred food’ list. You
don’t want them not eating dinner as they know they’ll get something better instead. You
want the back up to be acceptable but not desired.

Alternatively you could offer a healthy pudding. This is something I often do when I’m wor-
ried the kids aren’t even going to touch the something new and exciting. Something like
apple crumble that’s easy to do, mostly fruit and importantly is healthy and nutritious.

If you don’t want to offer them any alternative, you can keep their dinner on the plate and of-
fer it to them when they say they’re hungry. It’s up to you which strategy you use. These are
questions that you need to decide and you need to be consistent… it’s part of your ‘strategy’
that we talked about in the last chapter.

If you’re offering some food on the side, think about what else you’re eating with it. You
want something that they will eat, but not something that is on their ‘favourite’ list. You can
try offering the new thing first and leaving it on the side until they’re ready to try it. This es-
pecially works with toddlers. My two year old wasn’t very keen on stirfry the other day but I
just left it there whilst he ate his pudding and when he’d finished, he went back and ate his
first course. It doesn’t really matter what order you eat things, except that you don’t want to
eat loads of sweet dessert and then not have any room left over for vegetables.

Appropriate time
When are we going to try our new food? Find an appropriate time, you want them to be
hungry but not ravenous. Obviously if it’s dinner time it’s dinner time but with young chil-
dren often they get upset if they’re really hungry and they’re offered something strange. With
my toddlers I find giving them something new after they’ve eaten something familiar works
better.

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The power of peer pressure
If it’s dinner time, try to do it when you have lots of people who will be positive and enthusi-
astic about trying the new food. Family mealtimes are great for encouraging healthy eating.
Children love to do what other people do and if they see other people eating enthusiastically,
they are more likely to follow.

Talk about it
Even before you get the food out, you can expose them to the idea of new food. Talk about it,
mentally prepare them for something new. Talk about it in a positive light. Give it an exciting
name… you think I’m joking but there was a study that demonstrated that ‘X Ray vision car-
rots’ were eaten more than just ‘normal carrots’. So we often have Star Wars and superhero
themed dinners… or should I say names… ’Tatuine risotto’, ‘Batman pasta’. We’ve even had
‘blood boiling tomatoes’ and ‘super strength cucumber’. I have boys and that’s the sort of
thing they like, but you can adapt it to whatever your kids like.

Don’t leave talking there… talk about the food that they are presented with, turn it into a
game. “The Great food detective game”… or whatever you want to call it. Have a look at it…
What does it look like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? Get them to explore it
with their senses before they pick it up and eat it.

Very small amount

When you serve it to them, only give them a small portion. Large portions can be over-
whelming and they can always have more if they like it. The other day I made soup…some-
thing my children are quite used to. But soup can be slightly different. “I don’t like it” Galen
cried. I took it away, without a comment and put it in a little espresso cup. Dante used his
teaspoon and finished the whole cup. Galen drank his and asked for another. With the big
bowl, he felt overwhelmed, with the little cup he felt he could manage…and ask for more.

Allow them to spit

When they do try it, be prepared for them not to like it! (even if you think…that’s ridiculous,
it’s carrots…you like carrots! To them it’s new food.) Be prepared for them not to like it and
to spit it out if they don’t like it. Don’t force them to swallow it.

If they don’t like it and you force them to swallow it, they’ll be more resistant to trying new
things next time. We’re trying to create a safe ‘tasting environment’ for them. Plus you’ll
make it more difficult for that food to be accepted.

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Describe it
If they point blank refuse to even try it…get them to describe it to you in some words that
aren’t judgemental. They may well just try it to find some words, but don’t worry if they
don’t.

Food pairing… use what you know they

like
Now, let’s just go back a bit and think about what we’re going to cook. Let’s have a look at
‘food pairing’. What exactly is food pairing? It’s when we decide whether we like something
by grouping it in with a whole load of other things that we’ve already categorised in our
mind. For example, your children may have a category that they think of as “orange veget-
ables’… but at the moment it only contains carrots, which they like. So you present them with
some butternut squash and their category is increased. Whether they like it or not is a differ-
ent question. However, it can be one of the reasons for the preconceived ideas that they have.
You can use this to your advantage. Use foods that you know they like and present them
with the new ones that you know they’re going to be wary about. So, got a cheese addict?
When giving them new vegetables, try baking them with some cheese on top.

Bite Size Stories

Use what they like to your advantage.

I realised last night that I was missing a trick. We have baked potatoes with cheese and I did
some sweet potatoes as well. They are very much in the ‘I don’t like them list’. So I just do
them for my husband and myself and give the kids a tiny bit to taste. But hang on a minute I
thought… those potatoes are covered in yummy melted cheese and the sweet potatoes aren’t.
What on earth am I doing? I want to make them more appealing than the potatoes, not less. I
should have put cheese on the sweet potatoes.

Children use the taste pairing to categorise the new foods. In fact, there was a study where
children ate more brussel sprouts that were covered in cream cheese than if they weren’t. You
can think of other things to do, dips that kids like…. the all famous ketchup has long been
used to help children eat things. Clearly you don’t want them to eat too much of it, but in
moderation, everything is OK. What about sugar? A bit to hide the bitterness of a vegetable is
acceptable. Glazed carrots, what are they? They’re yummy carrots that have been cooked in a
bit of butter and sugar. And take it a step further… sprinkles. Personally I use them to make
my puddings extra special, but if you’ve got a sprinkle mad child who is hugely vegetable
resistant use them to your advantage. It may sound controversial, but I’d rather a child who
happily ate vegetables with a few sprinkles on, than one who didn’t eat any vegetables.

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Summary
There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to introduce children to new foods, but there are better and
not so great ways. Even if you have the most exciting, really tasty food and do everything
‘right’, it’s still going to take time. If you have a hiccup it could take even longer.

Patience is the key.

Just keep going and keep introducing new foods and before you know it you’ll be the envy of
all your friends.

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Remember
● Variety

● Exposure, exposure, exposure

● Talk about it

● Exciting names

● Presentation

● Prediction or Detective game

● Not just the new food, have something you know they’ll eat, but not always ‘pre-
ferred’ food

● Have a ‘back up’ a simple, nutritious, easy to prepare food, NOT a preferred food.
Try to use the same. Don’t give a choice. Or serve a nutritious pudding.

● Food pairing

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Further Reading
Repeated taste exposure increases liking for vegetables by
low-income elementary school children (Appetite Vol 55
Issue 2 p226-231)
Children were exposed to a selection of vegetables once a week for 10 weeks. They started to
like the previously unliked vegetables.

Take home message: Keep exposing them to foods that are new or perceived as unliked.

Repeated exposure and associative conditioning promote

preschool children’s liking of vegetables. (Appetite Vol 58
p 545-563)
Children were repeated exposed to vegetables that were considered unliked. Another group
was exposed to the same vegetables with a dip. They found that both groups liking ratings
increased. The dip group didn’t learn to like the vegetables more, but it did help to get them
tasted initially.

Take home message. Repeated exposure to vegetables helps children learn to like them. Dips can be
useful to get them to try them in the first place.

Exposure to foods' non-taste sensory properties. A nursery

intervention to increase children's willingness to try fruit
and vegetables (Appetite Vol 84 p1-6)
92 children aged between 12 and 36 months were allocated to either an intervention group or
a non-intervention group. The children in the intervention group took part in looking, listen-
ing, feeling and smelling activities with unusual fruits and vegetables every day for 4 weeks.
Both groups took part in a mealtime taste test. The children in the intervention group
touched and tasted the fruit and vegetables more than the children in the other group.

Take home message: Playing with food (away from the dinner table) is a good way to familiarise
children to that food and increases the chance of them trying it.

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Feel your food. The influence of tactile sensitivity on
picky eating in children. (Appetite Vol 84 p7-10)
Children were asked to taste various foods and feel various tactile stimuli. Liking of the foods
appeared related to liking of the tactile stimuli. The correlation was higher in younger chil-
dren (four to seven and a half years). Sensitivity to tactile qualities might therefore play a role
in picky eating.

Take home message. Children are sensitive to the tactile qualities of food.

Attractive names sustain increased vegetable intake in

schools. (Preventive Medicine 55(4):330-2)
Study 1. 147 school children were offered either ‘X-ray vision carrots’ or ‘Food of the Day’.
They ate twice as much of the X ray vision carrots.

Study 2. They tracked sales of vegetables in a school. They sold 16% more if they had exciting
names.

Take home message. Excitingly named vegetables lead to more being consumed.

“Pass the ketchup, please”: familiar flavours increase

children's willingness to taste novel foods. (Appetite 2000
Vol 34 p 95-103)
Children were offered familiar and unfamiliar chips with either a familiar dip or novel dip.
Children were more likely to eat the unfamiliar chip with the familiar dip.

Take home message. Use accepted things to introduce new foods.

Increasing children's liking of vegetables through flavour–

flavour learning. (Appetite 2007 Vol 48 p 259-262)
Positive flavour–flavour learning refers to a form of Pavlovian conditioning in which a neut-
ral flavour is paired with an already preferred flavour. Due to this pairing one acquires an as-
sociation between the neutral flavour and the liked flavour, resulting in a positive shift in lik-
ing and hence preference for the initially neutral flavour. In this study, they investigated
whether a flavour–flavour learning procedure increases children's preference for a specific
vegetable taste. Twenty one children were recruited and received six pairs of conditioning tri-
als comprising the tasting of a sweetened vegetable and another unsweetened vegetable
taste. At test the children had to evaluate the tastes unsweetened. Results show an increase in
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preference for the previously sweetened vegetable taste. It is concluded that flavour–flavour
learning may be beneficial in increasing children's liking and acceptance of vegetables.

Take home message. Pairing flavours helps children to like new things.

What kind of exposure reduces children's food

neophobia? Looking vs. Tasting (Appetite. 9(3):171-8)
A really interesting read on the effect of food neophobia and what influences it…Parental
pressure is bad. Family meals are good. Also a look at ‘picky eaters’ and how that is different
from food neophobia

Decreasing dislike for sour and bitter in children and

adults. (Appetite. 50(1):139-45)
Researchers added sugar to grapefruit, broccoli and cauliflower and found that weeks later
the children still accepted these flavours, even without added sugar.

Take home message. Children will eat ‘accepted’ foods, even if they are less sweet.

Specific social influences on the acceptance of novel foods

in 2-5-year-old children. (Appetite. 45(3):264-71)
A small study of 27 children that looked at whether they would eat something new when
they were eating with adults who were either eating the same thing or a different thing.

Take home message. Children are more likely to eat something that adults are eating as well.

Increasing children's acceptance of vegetables; a

randomized trial of parent-led exposure. (Appetite. 40(2):
155-62)
156 parents of children aged 2-6 were split into 3 groups. The first group ‘Exposure’ was ex-
posed to a new vegetable daily for 14 days. The second group ‘Information’ was given in-
formation about the new vegetable and parents in the third group ‘Control’ received no inter-
vention. After 2 weeks they were all presented with the new vegetable to try. The children in
the ‘exposure’ group tried more of the vegetable and liked it more than the other two groups.

Take home message. Repeated taste exposure to new things helps children to like new things.

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Modifying children's food preferences: the effects of
exposure and reward on acceptance of an unfamiliar
vegetable. (Eur J Clin Nutr. 57(2):341-8)
49 primary school children were split into 3 groups. The first group ‘Exposure’, ‘Reward’ and
‘Control’. The Exposure and Reward groups were exposed to red pepper 8 times over a 2
week period. The children in the Exposure group were told that they could eat as much of the
red pepper as they wanted. The children in the Reward group were told that they could have
a cartoon sticker if they ate at least one piece of red pepper. The control group had no inter-
vention. The Exposure group increased both liking and consumption compared to either the
Control or Reward group,

Take home message. Repeated exposure with no pressure works the best!

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104
 Processed Food

● Taste buds develop. They get used to things. Too much sugar and salt makes fruit and ve-
getables taste bland.

● Processed foods contain a lot of sugar, salt and fat.

● We can see what is in a packet by looking at the labels (sometimes they aren’t very clear
but we can get a rough idea.)
Taste buds develop
Before we look at processed food, let’s have a look at taste buds. There is a bit of a debate
about exactly where and what they are. Remember that taste bud map that you learnt at
school? Or at least I do. Well, it turns out that it’s wrong. But we do have taste buds for sweet,
sour, bitter and salt. As well as another taste bud called Umami which is a sort of savoury,
meaty taste. Things that are high in Umami include cured meat, fish, mushrooms and soy
sauce. (There is a theory that this is why ketchup is so popular.) When we’re cooking, it’s an
idea to try to hit as many of those taste buds as possible. We don’t have to overwhelm them,
just satisfy them. That’s one of the reasons that a little bit of a meaty flavour is so popular... it
hits that Umami taste bud.

Now, although some people have natural preferences for certain tastes, as I mentioned earli-
er, if you’re a toddler, that’s for sweet food rather than bitter food. But you can train your
taste buds. For example, if you’re used to putting lots of salt on your food, and then one day
you don’t, your food will taste bland. In contrast, if you use salt sparingly you won’t find the
same lack of salt bland but you will find other food overly salty.

This is an important thing to consider when we look at our children’s diet. We feed them lots
of food that is salty and sugary and then give them some vegetables and they’re unim-
pressed. It’s another interesting fact when people say they want their kids to eat spicy food.
It’s just a matter of getting used to it. Many kids in India eat spicy food and it’s not that they
have different taste buds, they’re just trained differently.

We’ll come back to this idea in a bit. What I want to do now is think about processed food
and why it’s so bad for us. Yes, we know it’s packed with sugar and salt, but why can’t we
just live off that and be done with it?

How are processed foods made?

If you look at how processed food is made, the manufacturers take a raw ingredient and strip
it of lots of nutrients so that it lasts for longer. Then because they’ve taken out all the taste,
they need to add stuff to make it more appealing to us. So they add sugar, salt and other stuff
like MSG. The majority of processed food is cheap and that’s what manufacturers care about.
They want a product that lasts a long time that is cheap so they can make a profit. Consumers
want something that is cheap and tasty. (And now more people are wanting ‘healthy’ which
has led to a host of new products which are marketed as healthy... some are more healthy
than others).

One of the problems with processed food is that there is big money in these products. These
companies spend an awful lot of money convincing us AND our children that their product
is desirable and we can’t live without it. They market things at children with fancy packaging
and cartoon characters. They spend a lot of money working out how to get us to buy things.

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From where things are placed in a supermarket to advertising. And yes, they spend a lot of
money working out how to be appealing to children. In many supermarkets you can see
things that kids desire are placed high up where children on the trolleys will see them and
low down where children who are walking will see them. And of course they package things
in large sizes so we get used to consuming large quantities of these packaged foods.

What is wrong with processed foods?

Many processed foods contain large quantities of sugar, salt and fat, plus other undesirable

ingredients.

As consumers, the problem with eating lots of processed food are varied. Firstly the ingredi-
ents generally aren’t great. Most of them are high in salt, sugar and fat. But also, they con-
tribute to training those little taste buds that we talked about earlier.

Am I saying that we have to cut out all processed foods? No, there are definitely some that
are worse than others. But I do think it’s important to be aware of how much you eat.

How can we tell what is in a food?

It can be more difficult than you think. For example, I once bought a bottle of water with a
hint of lime. Now to my mind, I thought I was buying water that had a squeeze of lime in it. I
was wrong. When I looked at the label, it had about as many different things as a can of soda.
Except it was marketing itself as water. Looking at labels is the first place to start.

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Lots of sugar

If you look at the side of a packet it will have two labels. The first is a list of ingredients, listed
in order of quantity. The first ingredients is the biggest. There’s more of that ingredient. It’s
really interesting to just look at this list and see how much sugar is added to things that we
think are savoury. Go and check your baked beans and tinned soups and see how high up
‘sugar’ is.

I just looked at my breakfast cereals. I have cornflakes which are 90% corn and then sugar.
And even bran flakes which is a good old boring ‘healthy’ breakfast cereal is 65% whole
wheat and then sugar. It’s amazing how much sugar is put into everything and we normally
don’t notice. If you want a scary exercise, weigh out how much sugar is in a can of fizzy
drink. There is 35g of sugar in a regular 330ml can of coke. That’s the same as 3 apples, but
without the good bits that apples have.

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Some of the problems with these labels is that they don’t include absolutely everything.
They’re legally required to include anything above a ‘trace’ which is a slightly vague term.

Often they use fancy terms or chemical names that we’ve never heard of when they could use
words that we would understand. For example, polysorbate 6 propylene glycol alginate in a
salad dressing. Any the wiser? Me neither so I googled it and found it on a page entitled ’12
Dangerous and Hidden Food Ingredients In Seemingly Healthy Foods’. They say that it is a
thickener and emulsifier that is also used as antifreeze in cars and on airport runways. Now I
don't know about you, but I think I'll pass on the antifreeze. It’s not difficult to make salad
dressing. Mix together olive oil, vinegar or lemon juice and some mustard. You can keep it in
the fridge for a while too. You don't need all those extra things they put in to make it last
longer and keep it cheap.

Lots of salt

The next label that you will find is the ‘how much of stuff’ is in each product. On this label
you can see how many calories, how much protein, fat and salt is in each product. And these
labels can get a bit confusing. Salt may be marked as salt or as sodium because it’s sodium
chloride so it’s made up of one bit of sodium and one bit of chloride. 1g of sodium is 2.5g of
salt.

The WHO recommends that we limit salt intake to less than 5g of salt per day as adults as it
can contribute to your risk factor for stroke and high blood pressure. (That’s 2g of sodium).
It’s a slightly controversial area but to my mind, the really important reason not to eat too

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much salt is because we get used to it and our kids get used to it. And where do we find it? In
all those processed foods. For example, in some salad dressing I can see that one serving has
260mg of sodium. That’s more than 10% of your daily intake in a bit of salad dressing. The
salad dressing that I make doesn't have any extra salt and it tastes great.

Easy To Eat
Have you ever noticed how easy to eat packaged foods are? Do you know what I mean?
Those lovely tasty cookies, you could eat just one more couldn't you? And so could your chil-
dren? Or perhaps one packet more!

I know, I know. They are really easy to eat. (It's all that lovely sugar, salt, fat and other chem-
icals.) But that's one of the problems. How many apples can you eat in one sitting? Two
maximum? That hardly even counts as over eating.

Processed food is much much easier to eat that healthy food. You eat some healthy food. You
feel full up. You eat processed food and it leaves you feeling as if you could eat a whole pack-
et more. And sometimes you do.

Have a look at your packets

I want you to look at all the processed foods that you use. Get them all out and have a look at
them and see what you think. Have a look at the ingredients and the how much is in it label.
It can be surprising. I was surprised to see that actually our cornflakes have more sugar and
less fiber than the chocolate cereal that we buy. The chocolate cereal is a ‘whole grain’ cereal
and actually has more fiber and less sugar. However, having said that, the kids only have it at
weekends as I don’t want them to get into the habit of eating chocolate cereal everyday. Nor-
mally we have porridge (or oatmeal) or muesli.

I said before that we’re not going to cut out all processed foods. Although if you want to
that’s great. But how do we decide which are the keepers and which we want to avoid? As a
general rule of thumb, the ones that have heaps of ingredients are worst. So the less the bet-
ter.

Take yoghurt for example. The yoghurt that I buy is plain greek yoghurt. I buy full fat as it’s
got a better taste and the kids need some fat as we discussed in chapter 1. So the ingredients
are whole milk, cream, lactose and milk proteins and a bacteria that they use to make the
yoghurt. I know what all of those are and I’m happy with them (although I have no idea
what they do to add lactose and milk proteins both of which are found in milk. I’m not sure if
they do something else to it, or they’re just including them twice.) We like to add different
things to our yoghurt so honey, raisins, nuts, fruit and fruit sauce which I make from fresh
fruit. (I know it sounds like lots of work but actually it only takes a few moments.) But take
other yoghurts and let’s see what’s in those. Now some are fine. But many contain lots of

110
sugar (which can be disguised as fructose or sucrose or even glucose syrup) and colourings
and flavourings. So not just fruit and yoghurt as most people are led to believe.

Throw out the worst of your packets

Have a look at the products that you buy. Take the worst of them and chuck them out and
stop buying them. I know that’s a hard line but in a few weeks you’ll have forgotten what it
is and more importantly so will your children. If your kids are like mine, they know what’s in
the house... and they nag! “Can I have a chocolate biscuit mum?” What chocolate biscuit I
ask? The ones that are in the garage?? (Where they aren’t supposed to go!)

Just a little food for thought. Processed foods aren’t just those things that come in packages.
Everything that you buy that isn’t grown is basically processed food. We live off pasta but
that’s processed. And what about those croissants and cakes that I love buying from the
bakery? I like to think of them as ‘more healthy’ than the ‘plasticy’ ones that we have at the
weekend but I suspect that’s wishful thinking that I’ve attached to the price difference! And
hamburgers that I buy from the butcher. They don’t come with labels. I presume they’re
mostly meat but the truth is I don’t know.

I’m not saying we have to worry about all of these things. I’m certainly going to carry on
buying tasty burgers from the butcher (and I expect they’re much better than the ones from
the supermarket.) It’s all about being aware of what we’re buying and eating and eating them
in moderation rather than living off them.

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Further Reading
Ignorance is bliss. How parents of preschool children
make sense of front-of-package visuals and claims on
food. (Appetite Vol 87 p20-29)
• Playful visuals appeal to children but parents associate them with junk food.

• Health claims, realistic graphics, and natural claims make products seem healthier.

• Fruit graphics meant to communicate flavours are instead perceived as ingredients.

• Parents may make unhealthy food choices as a result of front-of-package information.

• Parents accept misleading front-of-package claims when making quick food decisions.

Take home message: Look at the labels and don’t be swayed by the packaging.

Front-of-pack symbols are not a reliable indicator of

products with healthier nutrient profiles. (Appetite Vol 84
p148-153)
• We compared the nutrient profiles of foods with and without front-of-pack symbols.

• Front-of-pack (FOP) symbols did not indicate products with healthier nutrient profiles.

• No symbol type clearly identified foods healthier than products without a symbol.

• Minimum standards should be established for products with FOP symbols.

• Minimum nutritional standards may incentivise manufacturer product reformulation.

Take home message. Not all products that are marketed as healthy actually are.

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113
 Working it into Your day

Shopping

● Buy lots of fruit and vegetables.

● Buy something new.

● Take the kids.

If we aren’t going to live off processed foods…what are we going to do? We’re going to go
shopping! And we’re going to buy fruit and vegetables. I don’t want to sound trite but if
we’re going to be eating mostly fruit and vegetables…we need to buy mostly fruit and veget-
ables. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Vegetable boxes are a really popular thing these days
but you can get vegetables from small shops or supermarkets. If you’re lucky like me, you
might have a market. A great place to start.
Buy lots of fruit and vegetables
You can buy fruit and vegetables in many forms… fresh, tinned, dried and frozen. They’re all
good but ideally we want tasty, fresh fruit and vegetables that haven’t travelled halfway
across the world. If you can buy produce that is locally sourced you’ll find that it’s much
more tasty and it really sells itself. I know that we’re lucky and not everyone lives in a place
where they grow amazing stuff but I’m sure that half the reason that my kids eat so much
fruit is that the fruit that I buy is really sweet and tasty. If I give them something that’s not up
to standard, like a clementine that’s a bit sour, it’s likely to be refused.

Take your kids

When you go shopping, take your kids, make it fun and give them some choice. Let them
pick a new vegetable or fruit and work out what you’re going to do with it. You don’t have to
take them every time, I know shopping with kids can be a chore but from time to time it’s a
great thing to do. Let them see all the different things they can choose from. Nowadays, we’re
lucky enough to be able to order online and often food just appears in the kitchen. But make
in an outing. If you can find a market, make it a trip and have fun.

Buy something new

Buy stuff that you don’t know what you’re going to do with. Work it out later. It’s a great
way of coming up with new dishes. Last week, I bought a huge bag of grapes in the market.
They were cheap as they needed eating but I bought them to bribe the twins to get back into
the buggy (I know, I know, bribery is bad but they were also hungry and I think it would
have taken me an hour to get home if I hadn’t.) They ate lots, so did the boys. There were still
lots left. So I grilled them and turned them into an amazing pudding. I saw a recipe online for
panacotta with baked grapes and decided that the quite time consuming panacotta could be
substituted for a mixture of creme fraiche and yoghurt with some vanilla. It was amazing,
and discovered just because I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with a huge bag of overripe
grapes.

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Cooking

● Easy, quick, healthy food.

● Plan your meals.

● Start with the vegetables.

● Get the kids involved.

● Prepare ahead.

● Use a crock pot.

● Use your freezer.

● Cook too much (especially the vegetables).

So we’ve just bought all these fruit and vegetables and now what? What are we going to do
with them all? Eat them or cook them. Cooking is one of the chores of parenthood. My hus-
band sometimes jokes when I ask him what we should have for dinner and he says “noth-

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ing”. Back in the days before kids, that would be fine. Just eat a snack or see what you feel
like closer to the time. But it doesn’t work like that with kids. They need feeding!

Plan your meals

How you cook and how you work it into your life is a personal thing. But there are certain
things that you can do to make it easier for yourself. The first is plan your meals. I have to
confess I’m hopeless at this and spend ages thinking ‘what should we have for dinner’. When
I’ve actually decided, it’s much easier. I just get on and cook it.

Meal planning isn't difficult, you just have to spend 10 minutes or so thinking about it. You
can either go shopping as I do and buy whatever you find at market and then work out what
you're going to do for the week ahead. Alternatively, you can plan what you want to make
and go shopping to buy all the ingredients. Both ways are fine and save you hours of won-
dering what you're going to cook.

Start with the vegetables

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Cooking doesn’t have to be elaborate. Simple, easy cooking is great. Start with your veget-
ables and work your meal around them. If you’re a meat eater that’s great but I want you to
move away from the idea that you start with meat and add in your vegetables.

Thomas Jefferson said “I eat meat as a condiment to vegetables which constitute my principal
diet”. That’s the way it should be. Of course have your big family roast dinner on Sunday but
not every day. (And how about trying fish from time to time like my Spanish friends?)

Good quality Olive Oil

Another great tip from my Spanish friends is to invest in a bottle of good quality olive oil. It’s
amazing what you can do to improve something that looks like just some grated carrots, or a
grilled egg plant with a drizzle of olive oil. It brings it alive and suddenly you have an amaz-
ing ‘dish’. I often just chop stuff up and drizzle some olive oil on. And if you’ve got quality
produce you don’t need to do much more.

Your repertoire of cooking

As parents, how do we manage to cook? Most people have a ‘repertoire’ of ten or so dishes
that they rotate around at dinner time. Things that they know how to make and are comfort-
able with. And that’s fine. Try to have dishes that you can vary slightly.

Here’s my repertoire:

● Vegetable pasta. It’s quick and easy and I chuck in any vegetables that I can find.
Which keeps it different. The kids will eat it happily. Often they pick out bits of
aubergine (egg plant) but that’s fine. Also it’s a great way to introduce new vegeta-
bles, amongst familiar things. And if they leave the new vegetables, they’ve still eaten
a healthy meal.

● Vegetable chilli which uses pretty much the same ingredients but by changing the
spices and having rice instead of pasta, it’s significantly different.

● Vegetable stir fry. This is one of the children's favourite. It's packed full of vegetables
and sprinkled with seeds and nuts.

● Risotto. Risotto is easy and versatile, you can put pretty much whatever you like in it.

● Carbonara is basically eggs and pasta with a small amount of bacon. The kids love it.
It’s my ‘I haven’t got much time to cook’ meal.

● Chorizo stew is mostly vegetables, the chorizo adds a great meaty flavour but it’s re-
ally only there for flavour.

● Chicken pie (which has more vegetables than chicken and the kids love it.)

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 ● Vegetable curry.

● Muscles with spaghetti and tomato sauce. The tomato sauce is really easy to make
and muscles are quick to cook, you just need to clean them first. If the children don't
like muscles, that's fine, they just don't eat them.

Of course we have different things from time to time, especially chicken and fish but those
are the main ‘dinner meals’ and they allow me to present the children with new vegetables.
These are the mainstay of our dinner menus.

I also serve nearly every meal with extra vegetables or a salad on the side (the exception be-
ing stir fry which always has lots of cabbage in it.) It's an idea to maximise the amount of
vegetables that you offer to your children. They don't have to eat everything, but if you offer
lots, chances are they will eat some. Plus, I like vegetables and it's great for them to see adults
eating vegetables.

Prepare ahead
Now that you know what you’re going to cook for the family meal and you’ve done your
fabulous meal plan, you can use those five minutes that you have here and there to prep your
meal. You don’t have to cook at 'cooking time'. I know it can be complicated with comings
and goings throughout the day. I often cook most of dinner at lunch time when I have a bit of
quiet time. The babies have a nap, the older kids watch a bit of TV or are playing. I get on
with dinner. Even if you can’t cook all of it then, you can do things like chop onions and oth-
er vegetables. Even pre cook them for certain meals. It’s amazing what a difference it makes
when it comes to that time just before dinner.

I also use those five minutes to chop up some apples, pear or any other fruit to make a fruit
sauce. I just simmer them gently for about five minutes. It's great to eat hot or put in the
fridge. It can be used as a snack or dessert.

Get the kids involved

Another great idea is to get kids involved in cooking. OK, again, not all the time as it is time
consuming and it depends on the age of your kids. But it’s a great way for them to have some
control over dinner and to learn exactly what goes into making a meal. My kids often say
“yuck” and “I don’t want that” and I feel like saying… "well you do the cooking then!" They
do love being involved and one of their favourite meals is stir fry vegetables which is really
easy and they can all chop bits to their ability (which in the babies case is none but if they’re
around they sort of pretend to peel carrots and Dante who is four only uses a table knife
rather than a sharp one so he’s in charge of peppers.)

It’s a great way to train them for the future when they’ll need to cook for themselves. Clearly
just because they cook something doesn’t mean they’ll eat it, but it does get them involved
with the ingredients.

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Try a slow cooker (crock pot)
A slow cooker is a great way to make stews and soups. You plug in the cooker, chuck in your
stuff and then come back four to six hours later and everything is ready to eat. It’s great if
you have to go out for the day and want everything ready for when you come home. You can
cook pretty much anything you like in them but some things are better than others. I use
mine for poaching a chicken, making stews and when I have lots of tomatoes to jar.

Cook too much

When you’re cooking, cook too much, particularly of the vegetables. Then use them another
time. You can use them in the same dish or present it differently. For example, when I make
vegetable pasta, I cook heaps of vegetables and a little bit extra of pasta. The twins like veget-
able pasta for lunch but often for the rest of us, I put out just the cold sauce. It’s a great way
to present more vegetables. Equally cold beans, carrots, anything really. You can turn them
into a ‘Mediterranean’ salad with a bit of your olive oil or mix it up with some couscous to
make a couscous salad.

Just a quick word about food safety, if you are going to use leftovers, make sure you store
them properly in the refrigerator. If you want to reuse rice the Food Safety Agency in the UK
recommends that it’s cooled quickly (not left sitting on the stove after dinner), stored in a
fridge and used within 24 hours. It can produce harmful toxins so if you’re not sure about it,
don’t eat it.

Use your freezer

Make too much, freeze it and then the next week you have an instant healthy, home cooked
meal.

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Family meals

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123
 ● More likely to eat healthily and perform well at school, less likely to be obsese and partake
of high risk behaviour as teenagers.

● Try to enjoy them and make them fun.

● Turn off mobiles and other gadgets (no toys).

● Think about kids chairs.

● Have everything ready.

● Think about how you present the food (vegetables first).

● Build family traditions.

● Give everyone the same

● Try growing things in the garden

Family meals are a great way to promote healthy eating. I know that it can be really difficult
these days for everyone to sit down and eat together. I know it can be stressful, especially if
you have twins who are nearly two. And one of them is called Celeste and she wants to sit on
her daddy’s lap every meal and eat everyone else’s food and then throw her food all over the
place. And perhaps some old sardine bones as well. Yep, I know. Not exactly relaxing.

However, research shows that children who have family meals are more likely to:

● eat healthily,

● have less obesity or become overweight,

● perform better at school and

● are less likely to partake in high risk behaviour as teenagers.

Don’t you think that all of those benefits are amazing just from sitting round a table and eat-
ing together? I suspect the reasons behind it are multifaceted. I think that the power of other
people doing something is huge. How often does your nursery or childminder tell you that
your child eats perfectly there whereas at home you can’t get them to touch anything? The
power of peer pressure. So if your child sees you eating vegetables and salad, they will even-
tually join in… as long as you don’t put pressure on them to keep trying.

Obviously, you need to actually eat healthily too otherwise it isn’t going to work. Unsurpris-
ingly there’s research to show that if you don’t eat something chances are your kids won’t
either. I never used to eat mushrooms but my husband loves them. I realised that I never
gave them to my children and they didn't like them as they were unfamiliar. I've recently
started buying them and using them in meals. My six year old isn't keen on them but we
keep having them and he's getting used to them. I wish I had thought about it six years ago. I

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think it would have been easier to introduce them to him when he was younger. I missed my
window of opportunity when he was under two!

Another thing about family meals is it’s a safe place for kids to talk and feel part of a family. I
know this can be difficult. When I ask my kids what they do at school, they always say
“nothing’. So often I start by telling them something I’ve done. I suspect this feeling part of a
family accounts for better school work and behaviour. They probably feel more secure within
themselves.

How do we make family meals work?

● Start by trying to enjoy it. It’s supposed to be a fun time together. (If this means put-
ting the ‘manners training’ to the side for the moment, so be it.) Think of conversa-
tions that you can have. Or tell stories if your children aren’t keen on talking. Not
only is it fun, it’s a great way to distract them from the ‘yucky’ food that you’re hop-
ing they’ll eat.

● Turn off those mobiles, TVs and other gadgets and for kids that means no toys or
other distracting things.

● Think about kid’s chairs. They need to be an appropriate height, so if your kids are
little, slightly higher than an adult chair.

● Try to have everything ready. When my kids are kept waiting, I find that Celeste
starts banging the cutlery around and makes dents in the table. If dinner isn’t ready,
this is a great time to present them with some vegetables. We do something called a
‘Cucumber quiz’. I cut up bits of cucumber and ask an age appropriate question.
They get rewarded with a slice of cucumber. And the strange thing is that normally
they don’t eat cucumber. Other ideas are cut up vegetables, soup or even the veget-
ables that go with dinner. Call it a ‘starter’ and suddenly it becomes much more excit-
ing!

● Think about what you put on the table. Some families let people help themselves to
everything and some people serve things onto the plate. Or a mixture of both. It’s a
really good idea to leave some vegetables on the table. A bowl of salad, or cut up car-
rot sticks. Invite them to take more. Even if it’s something that they don’t normally
eat, leaving it there is an open invitation to try it. At lunch we normally have a bowl
of salad and recently Celeste who’s nearly two has been helping herself to it. She tries
a bit and often spits it out but it’s her way of being grown up and copying what
everyone else is doing. And as a bonus, she’s getting used to the taste and texture of
lettuce. Actually she swallowed a bit the other day. Sebastian however, is less keen to
try and is very good at saying ‘bread’ (although recently he's started saying 'more
broccoli').

● Serve the same to everyone and allow them to leave what they don’t want. By treat-
ing everyone the same you are reinforcing that everyone is equal. There are no ‘fussy’
or ‘picky’ eaters. (If your children have allergies you may not be able to do this but

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 try to do it as much as possible.) It’s so easy to fall into the trap of ‘Peter doesn’t like
tomatoes’. That’s fine. He doesn’t have to eat them. You may have to practice ‘leaving
things politely on the side’. (More accurately put, my children have to practice!) You
never know, they might just decide that they’re going to try a bit after all.

● Think about family traditions. They don’t have to be complicated but they’re a great
way to bond and create memories. Simple things like letting the birthday person
choose the meal to more complicated ones like writing and drawing menus or certain
people making certain dishes. Holidays and festivals are a great place to build family
traditions. We always have fish soup on Christmas Eve as it was a tradition that my
father had as a child.

Bite Size Stories

Being a role model for your children

We eat salad pretty much every day. We eat lunch together (the children come home from
school at lunch time in Spain.) Normally there is a bowl of salad in the middle of the table. I
offer some to the older children who normally eat bits (Galen likes lettuce and Dante likes to-
matoes.) I normally put small bits on the twins’ plates, often to see it go flying across the
room. Recently Celeste who is two has been helping herself to lettuce from the salad bowl.
She sees us eating it and she wants to be like us so she piles it onto her plate and puts it in her
mouth. Sometimes she chews it and spits it out. That's ok, it's quite tough and it has a strong
taste. But she's getting used to it. I wouldn't say she eats lots of it, but she is learning about it
and getting used to the idea that it's something to eat.

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Grow things in the garden

Another great thing to do if you can is grow things with children. I know that isn’t exactly a
short term solution but kids love getting muddy and doing a bit of gardening. My oldest son
loves peas because we used to grow them when he was little. When we lived in Wales. We
had a tiny garden and we didn’t grow much but we had a few pea plants and he would go
out and help himself. None of them ever made it to the dinner table but he still loves peas
and fresh ones from a pod. Sadly I can’t get them to grow here in Spain but we’ve had a few
cherry tomatoes. If you don’t have a garden, you can grow baby carrots in a plant pot on the
window sill. (Just use regular carrot seeds and eat them when they’re tiny.)

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Further Reading
Parent food purchases as a measure of exposure and
preschool-aged children's willingness to identify and taste
fruit and vegetables. (Appetite 2008 Vol 51 p 468-473)
62 parents with pre-school aged children looked at how much fruit and vegetables they
bought and how likely the children were to try a fruit or vegetable that was offered to them.
The more the parents bought (increasing the exposure) the more willing the children were to
taste the fruit and vegetables.

Take home message. Buy lots of fruit and vegetables.

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Healthy Snacks and Maximising
Fruit and Veg

● Snacks are an important part of our diet.

● Offer snacks at regular times.

● When possible, sit down at a table.

● Offer healthy snacks.

● Offer fruit and vegetables as often as you can.

● Keep treats hidden away and fruit and vegetables in sight.

● If your children have packed lunches, include fruit and vegetables.

How can we maximise the amount of fruit and vegetables that we offer our children? Never
miss an opportunity to offer them fruit or vegetables! If you think it sounds like hard work,
don’t worry…it will become second nature once you get into the habit. Sometimes it helps to
think about things in a different way. So here’s a little story about how I changed our daily
routine.

Bite Size Stories

Our dessert story

My husband is of the mind that you should finish your dinner before you get your pudding
(what we call dessert). Not necessarily all of it, but most of it. He says, and I agree with this
bit, that if you aren’t hungry, you don’t need pudding. But I argue, you shouldn’t pressure
children into eating. When parents disagree, life gets even more complicated doesn’t it? And
when I thought about it, one of the things that I dislike about pudding is that my children
come to expect it. Even though pudding was normally quite healthy, yoghurt and fruit, it was
the habit that they had gotten into that I objected to. Personally I hardly eat pudding, but for
some reason I give it to my children. (I think I had some idea about my baby eating yoghurt
back when I was weaning my first child. If I could go back, I wouldn’t introduce pudding…
or fizzy drinks. But I’m stuck with them now.)

Firstly we should not pressure children into eating. When we say that you need to eat all
your dinner to get to your dessert it gives out the message that dinner is a trial to be endure
to get your dessert reward.

Now, I agree with my husband that pudding should be included ‘in the meal’. That’s to say,
don’t fill up on dinner and then eat pudding when you’re full up. Actually ‘saving yourself’
for pudding is a good idea. So, I decided to stop pudding. Yes, there was a fuss. Surprisingly
only for one day. I warned them. They made a fuss. I didn’t budge. The next day they just ate
their dinner.

Then I started looking at snacks and thinking about variety and how to mix things up. For
me, snacks were a problem. I found that we were often running late and I would resort to a
biscuits. Plus I had a fridge full of yoghurt that hadn’t been eaten. So we decided to have
pudding at snack time before they go back to afternoon school. Actually it makes sense to let
them have yoghurt rather than just more biscuits. Pudding for snack! It’s plain greek yoghurt
and I often put tasty things like fruit or nuts in it. I also make sure that we have time for a
snack. Rather than eating a biscuit on the way back to school, we spend more time over it and
sit down at the table. It's part of our routine now so it's easy.

We also have pudding on Friday and Saturday and if I feel that dinner wasn’t hugely filling,
they can have pudding as well, something like fruit puree or just fruit. Now they are no
longer in the habit of expecting pudding every night.

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We’ve been doing this now for several months and during the week there’s no complaint that
there’s no pudding. As they often have yoghurt as a snack, I don’t feel bad that I’m depriving
them of pudding. It seems to be working really well.

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Snacks

So what about snacks? Snacks are a really important part of our diet. But we tend to overlook
them when we think about ‘healthy eating’. There is a tendency to think that if our children
eat a healthy dinner, it doesn’t matter what we feed them during the rest of the day. We hap-
pily reach for a packet of biscuits. Quick and easy! Or at least, that’s what I did (and some-
times still do). I find that I’m constantly preparing food, and it’s not my favourite occupation.
I know that biscuits aren’t great, but they’re cheap and they’re easy. And that’s the problem…
they’re too convenient.

Actually, it’s really important to think of snacks as part of our “healthy diet” and to use them
to our advantage. It’s important to have snacks, especially for young children who can’t go
long times without food before they get hungry and grumpy. Actually, if we offer healthy
snacks during the day, it takes the pressure off dinner time. You won’t feel so stressed about
them eating their vegetables if you know they’ve already eaten lots of healthy things all day.

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Offer snacks at regular times
If you don’t have a regular snack time it’s worth looking at your daily routine and incorpor-
ating one. As a rule of thumb, space out eating two and a half to three hours. So our day
works out roughly like this…breakfast at 7.30, snack at around 10, lunch around 1 (often the
toddlers have theirs a little earlier) snack before they go back to school at 3 and dinner at
around 6. The times don’t have to be exact, it depends on you and your children, but roughly
the same time every day.

Sit down at the table

Research shows that grazing increases the amount of food that you eat, so sitting down at the
table is a good way to signal that it’s eating time. When you get down, you’ve finished.
Clearly it’s fine to eat in other places too, but especially when you’re getting into your snack
routine, it’s worth emphasising sitting down at the table. It’s actually a good habit to get into,
to pay attention to what we’re eating rather than snacking as we rush around our busy lives.

Fruit in Sight

Have fruit and vegetables in sight and sweets and treats hidden away in a cupboard.

Keeping treats and snacks in the cupboard is a great way to keep them out of mind. I know!
Even by the tender age of 1 children know where they’re kept and are good at telling us what
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they want…but having fruit on display can distract from time to time! It brings fruit to the
front of their mind and they'll ask for it.

Even my most ‘treat driven, carb junky’ child will walk past a bowl of apples and ask if they
can have one. And my 2 year old just goes right up and takes bites out of them all.

Lunch Boxes
If your children take packed lunches have a look at those lunch boxes with a critical eye. We
have a tendency to think of packed lunches as ‘healthy’ but it really depends on what goes
into them. More often than not, they don’t contain enough fruit and vegetables and they have
lots of packets in them! Think about using left overs or fresh vegetables cut up. Nuts and
seeds and dried fruit are another great idea. Most kids love dried fruit.

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Offer healthy snacks

Never miss an opportunity to offer fruit and vegetables! I find that mixing snacks can be
good too, so perhaps some fresh fruit with some nuts and raisins. Or some fresh fruit and a
couple of biscuits (as opposed to just biscuits.) If you offer children just carbohydrates, they

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get a burst of energy and then feel hungry later on. If you offer carbohydrate with something
else, some protein, fat or fibre, it keeps them going for longer.

I know that it can be difficult to move away from the convenience of food that comes in a
packet, but actually, a whole apple isn’t difficult either. And even cutting it up if your chil-
dren prefer it cut up doesn’t take very long.

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Some Snack Ideas
In the same way that we try to have variety in what we eat, try to have variety in your
snacks.

● Fruit and vegetables, either whole or cut up.

● Dried fruit and nuts…served in little pots, or make your own trail mix (buy unsalted
and unsugared….not forgetting to read the packets.)

● Stewed fruit. It sounds like it takes ages, but it’s very simple. I collect all those half
eaten apples in the fridge and then cut out the cores and put them in a pan with a
little bit of water for 5 minutes. You can put in whatever fruit you like and either
have it as slices or puree it. You can then eat it as it is, or add it to yoghurt… or freeze
it to make ice pops in the summer.

● Yoghurt… check to see how much sugar is added. I buy plain and add fruit and
nuts… mango and yoghurt is a family favourite.

● Dips. Learn a couple of recipes that only take a few minutes to make and dip carrot
sticks and other cut up vegetables in them.

● Toast with fruit or vegetables on it. I like banana mashed on toast, sometimes with
some chocolate spread. Another favourite is either tomato or sliced cucumber with a
little olive oil drizzled on it. Avocado is another great spreadable vegetable.

Anything you want really! But try to move away from the idea of a snack as something that
comes in a packet and think of it as a mini meal.

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Fruit and Veg at other times of the day

Let’s think about how we can offer fruit and vegetables to our children at other times of the
day. Well, actually, we can do it at every meal. Sound bonkers? But have a look at this…

At breakfast we can offer cut up fruit to go with our toast and cereal. Or a whole piece if your
kids like it. But I find that when I cut up some fruit, it disappears before I’ve had a chance to
eat any myself. Try just seeing what happens if you leave it in the middle of the table. Fruit
puree is another great thing to eat at breakfast time.

At lunch and dinner, try to make use of your kid’s hunger to get them to eat vegetables. If the
meal isn’t ready, try the ‘cucumber quiz’. I cut up bits of cucumber (incidentally on that ‘un-
liked’ list) and ask questions and reward them with bits of cucumber. They love it. Once I left
my mother in charge and they ate a whole cucumber! (one of the big ones.)You can do it with
anything you like, chick peas, carrot sticks. I just use cucumber because it’s easy.

Offer a starter or entree. So a plate of vegetables, salad or soup are a great way to start your
meal (and very Mediterranean). Fill up on vegetables and then move to your main course.
You don’t have to worry if they don’t eat any more vegetables but if they do, that’s great too.

Extra vegetables on the side. Often people think “oh, it’s got some carrot in it”, that’s enough
vegetables. But think back to the MyPlate when we talked about half of what we eat being
fruit and vegetables… is a bit of carrot really enough? Extra vegetables on the side is a great
way to push you towards the correct proportions.

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Puddings! Puddings don’t have to be all chocolate or fat and sugar. Cooked fruit can make a
great pudding. I’m not a great pudding cook but I love doing a simple pudding with fruit…
it’s always so easy. Some stewed fruit with some creme fraiche mixed with a little vanilla es-
sence and a small amount of sugar with some sprinkles on top and my children are on cloud
nine. In fact, it’s good enough to serve to guests.

Keep Offering Fruit and Vegetables

When we start to think about it, there are heaps of ways that we can increase the amount of
times that we can offer fruit and vegetables to our children. The more they’re offered, the
more they’re likely to eat. And the more healthy stuff they eat, the more likely you are to en-
joy your dinner and trust them when they say they’ve had enough.

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Further Reading
“Snacks are not food”. Low-income, urban mothers'
perceptions of feeding snacks to their preschool-aged
children. (Appetite Vol 84 p61-67)
• Focus groups described low-income mothers' approaches to child snaking.

• Mothers perceived snacks to be less nutritious than meals.

• Snacks held hedonic appeal for mothers as well as for children.

• Offering snacks was seen as an effective way to manage children's behaviour.

• Mothers used a variety of strategies to limit children's access to some snacks.

Take home message: It’s important to remember than snacks form part of diet and should be just as
healthy as dinner or lunch.

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142
 Healthy Eating for Children
Course
If you feel you need more help I do a whole online course aimed to get your children eating
healthily. It's nine videos long which I send to you over five weeks. You can sit back and
watch them in the comfort of your own home.
144
People who have done the Course.
Lori Rippole from Phillidelpia

How did you improve your children's diet?

I began offering a variety of fruits and vegetables to my kids a lot more often. Every day after they
get home from school, I have a healthy snack sitting out waiting for them. This has reduced their
chance of choosing their own snack which was usually something not too healthy. I just stopped
buying most of the less healthy options such as cakes and cookies. It's been a slow process, but I
have seen definite improvements in the variety they are now eating.

Did you find the course helpful?

Yes, very much so. Specifically, I really liked the module on processed foods. Lots of good informa-
tion. The entire course was very well done. Even though I am in health care, I appreciate how you
talked in "regular person" terms. Your bedside manner, so to speak, is very cordial and down to
earth. If you were a practicing pediatrician in the states, I would love to bring all three of mine to
you. Also, I really like that you gave me permission to lose the stress associated with wanting my
kids to eat healthily. I thinks it's given me peace of mind that I'm doing the right thing.

Emma - mother to fussy eater Henri 22 months old (family doctor in the UK)

I found this course very helpful with lots of ideas about taking new approaches to the problem of
my fussy eater that I have been able to put into action. Also it is great just to have Orlena's sup-
port and reassurance through the process ; to help you understand why things have perhaps gone
a bit wrong, that it's not that unusual, and there are things you can try to improve your child's
eating habits.

Anne Willicombe (The Gingerbread Mum)

Orlena understands first-hand the frustrations of getting kids to eat healthily and her brilliant
course will not only give you plenty of practical advice you can use immediately with your fussy
eaters, but will probably get your whole family eating better!

Find Out More About the Course

Check out your Course Page to find out more about the course and how you can up grade.

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146
 It can be Difficult at times
Children and parenting can be frustrating, especially in our busy lives. Things don’t go right
and we don’t understand why. There are times when feeding your children a healthy diet
seems too hard to do.

My advice? Take a step back and have a look at the situation as a whole. Is it really an eating
problem or a behavioural problem that you’re struggling with?

If you’re struggling, you don’t have to go it alone. I’m here to help you. You can either email
me at orlena.kerek@snotty-noses.com or sign up for my course.
 Keep Going and Keep Moving
I hope you now feel well equipped to help your children eat healthily. Sometimes we have to
stop and remind ourselves not to get stressed and worried. We have to break out of our own
habits as well as help our children form good habits. I often find myself getting frustrated
with my children…the pasta is the wrong shape, or the food has been contaminated with
mushrooms (even though they’ve just eaten a whole plateful without noticing). Children are
frustrating and they try your patience. But we just have to keep going. Keep present healthy
food with lots of variety and keep going at presenting new things.

Now just turn off the TV, go out and get those feet running around. Make it fun, do some
family things together. (I’ve recently taken up roller skating. I’m not great at it but it’s fantast-
ic fun.)

Get your children eating healthily and enjoying exercise is the best gift of health that you can
hope to give them.
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 Free Video Course
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course that you can do. Sign up for the FREE BITE SIZE VIDEO COURSE.