Enska 2012
Beyond an Apple a Day
Ellyn Satter, a dietitian and family therapist in Madison, Wis., likes to remember the small boy whose mother brought him into Satter’s office because he was overweight. He sat miserably scrunched in a chair while Satter and his mother discussed his eating habits. Finally his mother groaned and said, “I’ve got another one at home who’s too skinny. How am I supposed to get her to eat more, and him to eat less?” Satter’s answer was blunt. “That’s not your job,” she said. “Deciding what they want to eat, and how much, is their job.” At that, the little boy sat up straight in his chair for the first time and gave a huge smile.
The notion that children can and should take charge of their own hunger still makes parents uneasy. After all, who else is going to keep a toddler from eating nothing but Marshmallow Fluff sandwiches all day? But many experts now believe that we’ve badly underestimated kids’ capacities for regulating wisely what and how much they eat. Satter, advises parents to be gatekeepers, not food police. “Parents are responsible for choosing what foods to have in the house, and what to put on the table,” she says. “Kids are responsible for what they eat.”
Excruciating though it may be to sit calmly through dinner while your toddler ignores the chicken and carrots in favor of two bread sticks and a cookie, research bears out Satter’s dictum. “We’ve done studies over 10 years that show most little kids are pretty good at being responsive to the energy content of the diet,” says Leann Birch, professor of Family Studies and Nutrition at Pennsylvania State University. In one study, children selected their own lunch, but it was preceded by either a low-calorie or a high-calorie yogurt. Sure enough, over a period of days they tended to balance the two courses so that they got roughly the same number of calories every time. “If parents impose too much control over what kids eat, it impedes this ability to self-regulate,” says Birch.
Unfortunately children’s marvelous regulatory mechanism does not appear to recognize the importance of cauliflower or leafy greens. On the contrary, under-3s have a finely honed “yuck” response that is readily activated by a single bit of any new food, particularly bitter-tasting ones. “We’re omnivores, so we’re programmed to eat lots of different things but to be very suspicious of anything new,” says Linda Barto of Yale University. That suspicion, which probably saved many a prehistoric tot from poisoning, now serves merely to drive parents crazy. Nutritionists agree that offering a new food up to a dozen times will usually wear down a child’s resistance. There’s also evidence that breast-fed babies may be a bit more open-minded than formulated babies, since the flavor of formula never changes. “We know from animal research that the more varied the mother’s diet during nursing, the more likely a young animal would accept novel foods during weaning,” says Julie Menella of the Monell Center in Philadelphia. A strongly flavored diet, of course, is just what many experts tell nursing mothers to avoid, for fear the babies won’t like the milk. But Menella found that when mothers consumed garlic, for example, their babies liked the novelty and stayed longer on the breast. “When a new food is introduced in mother’s milk, you don’t see aversions develop,” says Menella. “Mother’s milk is a flavor bridge to the foods of the culture.”
The most important reason to help kids learn to enjoy new tastes is that a varied diet of foods eaten for pleasure is likely to be a healthy diet. “Children love sweet tastes, and they like salty tastes. That’s all hard-wired,” says Barto. So kids need no encouragement to make fast food and junk food their favorites. Our national addiction to those foods contributes heavily to our rates of chronic disease.“
So, yes, it’s important for little kids to eat right. But it’s even more important for them to like food, enjoy being at the table, know when they’re hungry and quit when they’re full. Parents may not be able to exert much control over the consumption of squash, but they have lots of influence over kids’ emotional and psychological associations with food. That’s where healthy patterns starting in childhood will last a lifetime.
