Kids Prefer Vegetables to Other Foods If You do This

By Brad Sylvester

We all want our children to be healthy.  We do our best to help them to grow up strong and to stay strong and healthy later in life.  Helping our children form the habit of eating a healthy diet plays a very big part in achieving this goal.  Unfortunately, this can be very hard to do.  Kids can be very creative in finding ways to avoid eating vegetables they don’t like.  Sometimes the family pets are getting a more nutritious human diet under the table than our children are getting.  We see lots of studies saying how good this or that vegetable is for our kids’ nutrition.  According to The American Dietetic Association, our kids should eat 5-13 servings of fruit or vegetables each day. We've seen all the studies. What we, as parents, really want, though, is a study that helps us to get our children to more willingly eat these healthy foods, and, better yet, to form lifelong healthy eating habits. Guess what? Somebody did it!

Scientists have found a simple thing we can all do to increase the likelihood that our kids will eat, and perhaps more importantly will enjoy eating, more fruits and vegetables.  Furthermore, it’s something we can enjoy too.  It’s as simple as planting a garden and growing your own fruits and vegetables at home.  Children who almost always had home-grown vegetables available, ate five or more servings of them more than twice as often as those who rarely or never had home grown produce available.  A vegetable garden is like a Field of Dreams for parents; grow it and they will eat it.

The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Saint Louis and co-authored by Dr. Haire-Joshu, Director of the Saint Louis University Obesity Prevention Center .  It was a survey-based study tabulating and analyzing the interview responses of 1600 parents living in Southeast Missouri with preschool-aged children.

Guess what else they found.  Children who eat home-grown produce prefer fruits and vegetables to other foods.  What?  Are they kidding?  No, let me repeat, kids who regularly had fresh, home-grown fruits and vegetables available liked the taste of fruits and vegetables more than other foods.  It’s true.

Perhaps because of this, families who usually had fruits and vegetables had a greater variety of fruits and vegetables in the home.  The study shows that in these families, parents were seen eating fruits and vegetables more often.  Just in case we needed the further reminder that kids will behave the way they see their parents behave, the same Dr. Haire-Joshu in an earlier study, released way back in 2001, found that “attitudes toward food, choices in food selection, and timing of meals are in great part a result of parental modeling of behaviors." 

Really, it’s just that simple.  Plant a garden, because, as Dr Haire-Joshu says “It’s a winning and low-cost strategy to improve the nutrition of our children at a time when the pediatric obesity is an epidemic problem."

It’s worked in our family, when our son was younger, he was much more likely to try a new vegetable if it was one he helped grow in our garden.  Every farmer knows that once a kid tastes the sweetness of a garden pea fresh from the pod, you’ll have no trouble getting him to eat more. 

Another benefit of working with your children in the garden is that it gets them out of the house, away from the Wii, the Playstation, and the Xbox.  It’s a great place to engage them in conversation. Somehow when you’re both focused on some other task, kids feel freer to open up and talk.  Maybe it’s less threatening for young kids to talk about their feelings if you’re not actally looking right at them.  Whatever the reason, gardening is good for your kids and you in more ways than one.

Sources:

Saint Louis University, You are what you eat and your kids are too," Eurekalert!

Saint Louis University, Plant a garden to grow your kids' desire for vegetables and fruit, new SLU study suggests, Eurekalert!

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