Kids Like Vegetables Better With Dip

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

Plopping a bunch of raw broccoli on your child's plate will rarely work. Plain vegetables aren't usually very interesting. Cultures that eat a lot of vegetables, like Chinese and French, know ways of transforming the vegetables into delicious multi-ingredient dishes.

Don't feel like you have to feed your child plain vegetables. Make them as interesting as you can.

One way to do this is to make tasty homemade dips and let your child dip her vegetables into the dip. Toddlers and preschoolers especially love to dip. It makes a meal into a fun art project!

Researchers have found that providing dips with vegetables encourages children to eat them, especially those who are genetically sensitive to bitter tastes.

Once you have found a few dips that your child loves (and fed them to her enough times to overcome her natural initial resistance), you can use the dips to introduce new vegetables. Anything will taste good if it's plunged into your child's favorite dip.

Don't worry about the fat content of dips. Young children -- and possibly even up to teenagers -- need good fatty acids to build their brains.

Here are some quick recipes and ideas for dips:

• sour cream (add chopped herbs or salsa)
• olive oil and balsamic vinegar with finely diced herbs and garlic
• hummus
• black bean dip
• peanut butter (broccoli and peanut butter? Whatever works!)
• ketchup (also weird, but whatever works!)

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.

Related Links

25 Ways to Get Your Child to Eat Vegetables
Why Children Don't Like Vegetables -- And What You Can Do About It 

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Family Meals Help Children Like Healthy Foods: Part 1

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

Most young animals have to learn what to eat. A young fawn nuzzles her mother's nose aside and eats the very plant that her mother was eating. If the fawn went off and foraged for herself, it wouldn't be long before a sad incident with a deadly nightshade plant would mean the end of her short life.

Your child has the same instincts. Sitting with Mom and Dad at the dinner table gives him reassurance that the food is not poisonous. Not consciously, of course. But new food to a young child is frightening (although we adults are too old to remember this) and if Dad and Mom are enjoying it, it triggers the unconscious mind to accept the food.

This is one of the reasons why a family meal is so important. You've probably read magazine articles or online news articles that praise the family meal. Recently, yet another study has found that family meals are beneficial -- this time in helping picky eaters become less picky.

One reason family meals help picky eaters is by reassuring them that the food is safe, Next week I'll talk about other ways that a family meal can help your picky eater learn to enjoy many healthy foods.

More Tips on the Family Meal

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.