Smelling Healthy Foods Makes Your Child Like Them Better

By Julia Moravcsik, PhD, author of Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food

The smell of food is part of its flavor. If you want to teach your child to like the taste of healthy food, you will need to give her lots of "lessons" in the taste of healthy food.

One way to do this is to let her smell food. Smelling food is safe -- she doesn't actually have to TRY it! It also gets her accustomed to the taste of healthy foods. If your child sniffs guavas a few times, she may find them less strange when she actually gives them a taste.

Children often need a dozen or more "lessons" in a food before they come to like it. Smelling is an easy and painless lesson.

Sniffing Healthy Food Makes Processed Food Seem Boring

Processed foods have very little flavor.  They may taste salty, sweet, or fatty, but they don't have the fresh, strong flavors of real food. 

If you teach your child to like the tastes of fresh food, he will shun the nasty, insipid tastes of processed foods.  The artificial flavors, stale flour, and procesing chemicals will taste repulsive to him. 

The most straightforward way to teach your child to like healthy flavors is to give your child home-made foods made with fresh ingredients.  However, you can also help your child learn this lesson by letting him smell fresh ingredients.

Sniffing at the Supermarket

When you're at the supermarket, let your little tyke smell the food that you're putting in the grocery cart.  You can pick up a basket of strawberries and smell them yourself, and then say "Ummm, tasty strawberries!"  Then give them to your child to smell.

Sniffing Makes Food Fun

There are a few other advantages to letting your child smell food.  First, it makes food into a fun, playful toy.  Your mom may have told you not to play with your food, but playing with food is a wonderful way for children to overcome their misgivings about it. 

Sniffing Makes Children Pay Attention to Food and Its Tastes

Playing the smell game also teaches your child to pay attention to his senses.  Many people wolf down their meals without even really paying attention to them.  Your goal is to create a young foodie out of your child -- he should love healthy, fresh, wonderful-tasting food, and dislike the bland, artificial flavors of processed food.  Teaching him to pay attention to his senses of smell and taste will help him along in this goal.

Would you like a simple, easy-to-follow program that will teach your child to love healthy food? See my new book Teach Your Child to Love Healthy Food on amazon.com.

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