Children Like the Food They Grow Up With

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

My husband likes healthy "foodie" foods.  Some of his favorite foods are samosas, hummus and whole wheat crackers, and broccoli.

But when we visit his parents, a strange thing happens.

A bowl full of an unnaturally bright green, jiggly substance makes his eyes light up with happiness.  It's "Perfection Salad"-- lime jello with chopped cabbage and carrots.

I have to tease him about liking a food that is so out of line with his other tastes.  But it makes me think.  Why does he like it?  Not because it inherently tastes good.  He likes it because he ate it when he was a child.

Children Learn Food Preferences Early

Researchers have found that food that children eat before age 3 sets their preferences for the rest of their lives.  Children who eat vegetables in their first 3 years like them as adults.  Children who eat french fries and pop tarts in their first 3 years like them as adults.

Each time you give your baby or toddler a meal, you are teaching him a lesson.  You are teaching him foods that he will habitually reach for 30 years later.

This is a frightening concept because the foods many parents give their children are foods that could kill them 50 years later.  Diet is now the #1 preventable cause of early death.

The Good News: Young Children Are Programmed to Learn New Foods

Babies and toddlers are programmed to learn to like the taste of new foods.  Young babies will accept anything.  Toddlers are pickier (probably Nature's way to ensure that they don't swallow the potentially poisonous things that they cram in their mouths).  However, even toddlers will learn to like foods as long as eat them often enough.

Early childhood can be an exciting time for parents who are determined to give their children a lifelong love of healthy foods.  What you feed your children now can have a huge impact later.  You can teach your children to have good eating habits for the rest of their lives just by giving them the right kind of food.

More Good News: You Control Their Environment

When your children go to school, they can trade food with other kids. When they are teenagers, they can buy their own food.  But when they are babies or toddlers, you can decide exactly what they eat.

Young childhood is a very easy time to teach children to love healthy food.  Just avoid sweets, bland refined grains, and other junk food.  Focus on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, dairy, and healthy unprocessed meats.

What If My Children Are Older Than 3?

What if you've already passed that crucial age?  Is it too late to teach a 6 year old, a 10 year old, or a teenager to like healthy food?

People of all ages can learn to like healthy food if they repeatedly eat the food, and don't eat the junk foods that make real food taste bad.

Even adults can change their taste preferences.  A vegetarian who decides to avoid meat for ethical reasons finds that after several months he doesn't like the taste of meat anymore.  A heart attack victim who switches to a diet full of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains finds that after a while he doesn't miss the hamburger and french fry lunches that he used to love.

If you start when your child is older than 3 it may take longer and not be as complete.  But you can definitely make a huge difference.

What About Teenagers?

Teenagers reach another period where they are open to new tastes.  Their brains are growing and changing rapidly, which makes teenagers receptive to new experiences.

The good news is that teenagers are less picky than younger children.  The bad news is that teenagers usually have the freedom to eat whatever they (or their friends) want.

It's important to have regular family meals with your teenager.  Try to aim for a family breakfast and a family supper.  Your teen will experience at least one or two meals a day of healthy food.

Teach your teen about nutrition (without being preachy).  Related it to something she is interested, like improving her basketball game or reducing acne.  Avoid mentioning her weight or suggesting that she diet because doing these things might trigger an eating disorder.

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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25 Ways to Get Your Child to Eat Vegetables

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

Of all the foods, vegetables are the hardest for most kids to learn to like.  This is not surprising.  Vegetables have qualities that make them hard to learn to like.

• They're bitter.  Human beings have a natural aversion to bitter tastes because bitterness is an indication of alkaloids, some of which are poisonous.
• They're low calorie.  Human beings have an instinct to like foods that are high in caloric density.  Our primitive ancestors had to guard against starvation.

This does not mean that your child cannot learn to like vegetables!  It only means that your child has to learn to like vegetables.  It doesn't happen automatically.

These tips will help you to teach your child to overcome his natural aversion to vegetables and learn to love them!

Tips for Babies (and Fetuses!)

Eat vegetables in the last third of your pregnancy.  During the last trimester, your fetus is getting a head start on learning the foods that it will be eating for the rest of its life.  Researchers have found that if pregnant women eat carrots, when their babies are starting solid food, they already like the taste of carrots because they learned it in the womb. Eat the kind of food that you want your child to be eating for the rest of its life.

Avoid sweets in the last third of your pregnancy.  Babies who are exposed to sweet tastes in pregnancy may have more of a sweet tooth later on.  Kids who like and expect foods to taste excessively sweet won't like the subtle sweetness of carrots or cauliflower.

Breastfeed your baby, and eat vegetables during this time.  The food you eat flavors your breast milk.  Nature is teaching your baby the taste of the foods of his future.  Eat a wide variety of vegetables during this time.

If you feed your baby formula, use protein hydrosylate formula.  Protein hydrosylate formulas have the milk proteins broken down by enzymes.  This creates a bitter taste.  Babies who drink this formula are more accepting of vegetables later on because they have learned to like bitter tastes.

Feed your newborn baby tiny tastes of vegetables.  You can give your newborn baby TINY tastes of vegetables, even before he eats solid food.  You can do this by adding a teaspoon or two of vegetable cooking water or vegetable juice to his milk or formula.  Remember, you don't want to add enough to dilute his milk or to add calories.  You are just adding a smidgen of flavor.

Start solid foods early.  Start feeding your baby solid foods at 4 months.  There is no advantage to waiting.  Doctors used to recommend waiting because they thought that early feeding would cause allergies.  Now some researchers are finding that waiting actually encourages allergies.

Give vegetables as an early solid food.  Early foods may have a special influence on your child's later eating habits.  There is no reason to start with bland-tasting cereals like rice or wheat.  They aren't teaching your baby anything about tastes.  Start with vegetables, and work your way quickly to strong, bitter-tasting vegetables like spinach or broccoli.

Feed your baby a new vegetable twice a week for 6 weeks.  It can take time for your baby to learn to like a vegetable.  Give your baby a new vegetable twice a week for 6 weeks.  If he still doesn't like it, wait 3 or 4 months and try again.

Be patient and positive.  Healthy foods like vegetables can take weeks to learn to like.  Junk food takes no time at all.  Even as your baby spits out the spoonful of cauliflower, he is learning to like it.

Tips for Young Kids

Stop the junk food, especially sweets.  Human beings have an instinct to eat high calorie food if it is available.  Our primitive ancestors had to gorge on the high calorie food that they found.  If they filled up on vegetables, they wouldn't have the stomach space available for the high calorie food.  Eating junk food makes vegetables taste bad.

Serve vegetables for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  The more taste lessons your child gets, the faster he will learn to like vegetables.  Feed him vegetables at least three times a day, preferably more.

Feed your child a new vegetable twice a week for 6 weeks. It takes children of all ages up to 12 tries to learn to like a new healthy food.  Wait for a few days between servings.

At the beginning, add fat or a tiny amount of healthy sweetener to the vegetable.  Children have a natural liking for sweet and fatty tastes.  You can add butter, sauces, or fruit juices to help your child like the vegetable.

Find good recipes.  Plain vegetables aren't usually very tasty.  Scout around the internet for highly rated recipes.

Serve a vegetable to your child when he's hungry.  Hunger makes everything taste good!  Start dinner each night with a vegetable appetizer.

Eat the vegetable yourself.  Children, like most mammals, look to their parents to learn what is edible and tasty.  Eat the same vegetable yourself, and comment on how good it is.

Play with your food.  Make the vegetable friendlier by playing games with it.  You can cut vegetables into fun shapes, or put pieces together into an animal shape.  If your child has a stuffed rabbit, you can have him feed vegetables to the rabbit.  He may absentmindedly eat them after he's done playing.

Talk about vegetables.  Name each new vegetable, and comment on what it looks like and tastes like.  New foods are scary to kids, and any information is reassuring.  Skip the nutrition lessons, though.  They make it seem like your child should be eating the vegetable because it is nutritious, and not because it's tasty.  Although this may be true, your child will rebel if he knows this.

Keep a veggie and dip tray on the counter.  In general, don't let your child forage in the kitchen.  You should decide what he should eat.  However, a tray of vegetables lets him satisfy his hunger and gain some independence.  

Have all-vegetable meals.  Once or twice a week you can have vegetable dinners.  Give your child two or three dishes that have vegetables in them.  They can have other ingredients too, but make sure the vegetable is one of the main ingredients. 

Grow vegetables. Your child will be more likely to eat vegetables if he helped grow them himself.  If you don't have room for a garden, you can grow some herbs or a tomato plant indoors.

Use fresh vegetables.  Vegetables take a week or more to get to the supermarket.  Fresh vegetables from a farmer's market or community supported agriculture taste much better.

Tips for Older Kids and Teenagers (You can use the tips in the previous section too.)


Help them ignore peer pressure.  Kids brag about eating junk food.  Your child may feel left out if other kids get chips and candy for lunch and he doesn't.  Try to find genuinely healthy food that looks appealing.  Try to elicit the support of other parents in providing healthy meals for all kids.  

Teach them about nutrition.  Don't preach, but do teach your children that some foods have extremely bad consequences.  Diet is the #1 cause of death in modern cultures.  You want to reassure your child that you love him and you want the best for him.  

Teach them about the immediate consequences of healthy food.  Most children have noticed that eating too much candy or chips makes them feel sick.  Gently call attention to this. 

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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Getting Your Kids to Like Whole Grains is Easier Than You Think

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

What if I were to tell you that there was a simple change you could make to your child's eating habits that:

• your child wouldn't even notice
• wouldn't make your child whine or complain
• wouldn't take any effort on your part
• would cut your child's risk of obesity, asthma, high blood pressure, cancer, and diabetes

The Whole Grain Switch: Your Child Won't Even Notice!

One of the easiest switches you can make is to serve whole grains instead of refined flours.  Amazingly, researchers have found that children often don't even notice when whole grains are served instead of refined grains!  And they often rate the whole grain products as just as tasty as the refined grain products!

Whole Grains are Easy

Vegetables may be hard to peel and cut.  Home-cooked meals may take time.  But it takes no more time or effort to use whole grains than it does to use refined grains.

Grabbing a package of 100% whole wheat bread is just as easy.

Selecting a bag of whole wheat flour is just as easy.

Buying the pizza with the whole wheat crust is just as easy.

How To Tell If a Food is Whole Grain

Manufacturers will try to trick you.  They know that many shoppers will buy food that looks healthy, and won't check the ingredients.

Beware of these manufacturer scams:

• Using the word "wheat".  Real whole wheat products will say "100% Whole Wheat".  Even Twinkies are made with "wheat"!!
• Using phrases like "made with whole wheat" when the first ingredient is refined white flour.  Always look at ingredients!  The first ingredient should be "whole wheat" and there should be no mention of "enriched flour" or "wheat flour" on the ingredient list.
• Making the packaging look healthy by using brown or green colors, pictures of trees or wheat plants, or other healthy imagery.

The ingredient list cannot lie.  Always make sure that "whole wheat" is the first and only wheat ingredient.

What Foods Have Whole Grains?

Your child will enjoy:

• Bread and rolls -- Almost all supermarkets have 100% whole wheat breads and rolls.  Some are delightfully light (which appeals to kids who are used to white flour).  Some are wonderfully chewy, with whole kernels of wheat (which appeals to kids who are used to whole grains).
• Pancakes -- Homemade pancakes are just as easy to make as packaged pancakes.  Pancake mixes simply combine flour with baking powder and a few flavors. Use this recipe (but use all whole wheat flour) to make pancake mix that will last for months.
• Tortillas -- Most supermarkets sell 100% whole wheat tortillas.  Burritos will have much more flavor if you use these tortillas.
• Pasta -- Spaghetti, tortellini, linguini, lasagne -- whole wheat noodles come in all  shapes and sizes.
• Baking -- Most recipes will be virtually indistinguishable if you use whole wheat flour.  Experiment to see which ones work the best.
• Oatmeal -- All oatmeal is whole grain, even instant.
• Popcorn -- Yes, popcorn is a whole grain! 

Start Today!

This simple change takes no time and effort and can reap huge health benefits.  Throw out your white bread and resolve to only eat whole wheat bread from now on.

For a great resource, check out the Whole Grains Council.  They have a huge number of articles, tips, and recipes.

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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Using High Antioxidant Sweeteners for Baking

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

Sugar, as everyone knows, is a source of empty calories.  That means that it has no nutrition other than calories -- no vitamins, minerals, or protein.

Sugar also has practically no antioxidants.  A high antioxidant diet may prevent asthma, cancer, diabetes, and maybe even diseases like autism or inflammatory bowel disease. 

Some alternative sweeteners are extremely high in antioxidants.  If you substitute these sweeteners for sugar, your muffin or bread will be much higher in antioxidants.

Before I begin, I want to begin this article with 2 warnings. 

No Sweeter Than Fruit
Sweet tastes will make your child crave more sweet foods.  It will also make healthy foods like vegetables less appealing.

Only use sweeteners as a minor ingredient in otherwise healthy foods.  A rule of thumb is that the baked item should taste no sweeter than fruit.  Fresh fruit should be the sweetest thing that your child eats.  Otherwise, the threshold for what she considers sweet will start to go up, and mildly sweet foods like carrots won't taste sweet enough.

Most recipes will taste just as good if you cut the amount of sweetener in half, or even by two-thirds.  Sugar usually doesn't affect the chemistry of baking.  Don't reduce the amount of sweetener in yeasted breads because the sweetener is used by the yeast as a food source.

Not for Babies
Even mildly sweet tastes may teach your baby to like sweeter foods later on.  Wait until your baby is 2 years old or more before feeding her even mildly sweet baked goods.

Syrupy sweeteners, like honey, molasses, barley malt syrup, maple syrup, or brown rice syrup shouldn't be given to babies because of the risk of botulism.  Toddlers have a well-developed immune system so syrupy sweeteners won't be a problem for them.

High Antioxidant Sweeteners

These sweeteners are extremely high in antioxidants:

• Blackstrap molasses
• Dark molasses
• Barley malt syrup
• Date sugar
• Buckwheat honey

(For a complete list, see this article)

 Blackstrap and Dark Molasses
These sweeteners can be substituted for any recipe that calls for honey.  To substitute for sugar, follow these guidelines for honey. 

Molasses has a very strong taste -- wonderful, but strong.  You may want to combine it with a milder sweetener to cut its taste.

It has approximately 400 times the antioxidant value of sugar.

Barley Malt Syrup
This sweetener has a pleasant malty taste.  It may be difficult to find, but you can find it at Whole Foods or other natural food stores.  It can also be purchased online. 

It has approximately 200 times the antioxidant value of sugar.

Date Sugar
Date sugar is dried, ground up dates.  It is mild and pleasant tasting.  It does not taste extremely sweet so you may need to add more of it than you would the syrup sweeteners.

You can find date sugar in natural food stores or international food stores, as well as online.

It has approximately 400 times the antioxidant value of sugar.

Buckwheat Honey
The antioxidant value of honey can vary widely depending on what plant it was made from. Buckwheat honey has the highest antioxidant value of any standard honey.

Buckwheat honey is a strong, but pleasant-tasting honey.  Its flavor may overpower a recipe, so make sure the other ingredients have strong flavors as well.

Buckwheat honey has been found to increase the antioxidant value of plasma, which shows that the antioxidants are absorbed into the bloodstream.  This is important, as some high-antioxidant chemicals aren't easily absorbed.

Buckwheat honey, like all honey, can also help fight viruses and bacteria.

Other Ingredients Should Be Healthy

The other ingredients in a muffin or bread also contribute to the antioxidant value.  Whole grain flours are much higher in antioxidants than refined flours.  You can substitute some buckwheat flour, which is extremely high in antioxidants like rutin.

Add grated vegetables like carrots and zucchini or mashed vegetables like sweet potato or pumpkin to the baked product.

Learning to Like Healthy Sweeteners

Healthy, high-antioxidant sweeteners tend to have their own tastes -- ranging from medium to strong.  Refined sugar is used by manufacturers because it has no taste of its own.

If you teach your child to like these healthy sweeteners by giving them to her when she's young, she will love them for the rest of her life.

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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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.

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Snacks Can Be Good for Kids

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

Snacking, Not Snack Foods

 Snacking has a bad connotation.  This is partly because the word "snack" can either mean food between meals OR junk food.  "Snack food" means food like cookies, candy, chips, and other low nutrition, processed food.

Children Need Frequent Meals

Snack food is bad, but snacking is good.  Children, especially small children should get one or two snacks between meals. Snacking helps prevent children from getting too hungry between meals.  If a child gets too hungry, they tend to crave high calorie foods.  If they have a more moderate influx of food, they are more accepting of healthy foods with lower calorie density.  You want to prevent your child from getting stuffed or extremely hungry.

Vegetables for Snacks

Snacks are a great time to give your child healthy foods like vegetables.  At mealtimes, your child will have a variety of foods to eat -- it's easy for her to skip the vegetables.  Snacks usually contain one or two foods, so she can't avoid the vegetables by satisfying her hunger with something else.  Vegetables also satisfy hunger without "spoiling" your child's appetite.

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.

Don't Give Your Child Chocolate Milk

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

If you give your child chocolate milk for no particular reason, you probably won't be the type who reads this blog!  But some very conscientious parents give their children chocolate milk because their children have refused to drink unflavored milk.  These parents figure that milk with chocolate added is better than no milk at all.

One of the problems with chocolate milk is that children who drink chocolate milk don't adjust their total number of calories to compensate for the additional sugar.  They eat the same number of calories from other foods than if they had drunk regular milk. 

Chocolate milk has about 75 more calories per cup than regular milk.  So, if your child drinks two cups of chocolate milk per day, he will consume 150 more calories per day than he would otherwise!  This alone will cause your child to become overweight!

Another reason not to give your child chocolate milk, which is in line with the purpose of my blog, is that giving your child unnaturally sweet tastes, like chocolate milk, will teach him to crave the taste of sweetness.  Children naturally like sweet tastes (even newborn babies), but if you feed your child something sweet each day, it will teach him to expect sweet tastes every day.  When he is a teenager or adult, he will be more likely to feel like meals have to include something sweet. 

There are other ways to turn a milk-hater into a milk-lover.  Stay tuned, and I'll post more on how to accomplish this later.

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Vegetable of the Week: Chard

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

Each week, start teaching your child to like a new vegetable. Follow these 4 rules:

1. Feed each vegetable to your child twice a week.

2. Give your child the vegetable two times a week for six weeks. That’s a total of 12 times. After 12 presentations, your child will probably like the vegetable. If she doesn’t, wait for a few months and start the whole process again.

3. Don’t feed the same vegetable to your child two days in a row. Wait a day or two before giving her the vegetable again.

4. If your child tastes the vegetable, count it as a success. She may spit it out, but her brain is still registering the taste.

Six weeks from today your child will probably be an chard lover!

About Chard

Many people have never tasted a cooked green except spinach. Chard, like many other lesser known cooking greens, is much more nutritious than spinach.

Chard has a "green" and slightly bitter taste. The bitter taste is excellent taste training for your child. The more bitter tastes a child experiences when she is very young, the more she will like vegetables and other bitter tasting foods later on.

If your child is younger than 6 months, wait until she is over 6 months old before feeding her chard and any other leafy green. Leafy greens contain chemicals which are harmless to older babies, but may, in rare cases be dangerous for young babies.

Vary the chard dishes so your child doesn't get bored. Here are some quick and easy dishes:

1. Chop and boil the chard until it is soft. Make olive oil béchamel (here's a recipe from the New York Times). Mix and serve.

2. Chop and boil the chard until it is soft. Add a large spoonful of sour cream and a few squeezes of fresh lemon juice. Mix and serve.

Post a comment and tell me how it went!

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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Hiding Healthy Food in Your Kid's Dishes: How to Do It, How Not to Do It

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

There are several popular books, like The Sneaky Chef, which tell you how to hide healthy foods in your child's favorite dishes. Desperate parents resort to doing this because they can't get their children to eat healthy foods like vegetables. If their child won't eat anything but chocolate chip cookies and bologna, then at least if they hide spinach in the chocolate chip cookies, their child is getting SOME vegetables.

It's the strategy of a desperate parent, but it ultimately fails. Here are some of the problems with hiding healthy foods in unhealthy junk-food dishes.

Kids don't learn to like the taste of the food. If the healthy food is hidden so well that it can't be tasted, then your child will never learn to like the taste of the food. Young children often have to taste a food 12 - 15 times in order to like it. If spinach is hidden in chocolate cake, your child could eat the cake a hundred times and still not learn to like spinach.

The caloric content skyrockets. Most healthy foods are low in calories. If you hide 50 calories of spinach (a child-size serving) in 300 calories of chocolate cake, the nutrition of the spinach has to be spread out over 350 calories. What was a vitamin, mineral, and phytonutrient dense food is now diluted by the empty calories. It becomes, at best, a moderately healthy food.

Your child is learning to like the taste of junk food. If your child eats chocolate cake often, she will learn to love chocolate cake. As far as your child's taste preference education goes, you are teaching her to love chocolate cake, not spinach. She may be getting a tiny bit of extra nutrition now, but when she's an adult, she'll reach for a slice of chocolate cake because it is "comfort food" from her childhood.

How to Hide Food and Make It Work

You can still use the Sneaky Chef strategy, if you use it wisely. If you add a food to a dish that your child loves, it will make her accept it more.

Here's how to SUCCESSFULLY hide unfamiliar or disliked foods in your child's food.

No Junk Food. Only "hide" food in nutritious dishes. Make a vow to feed your child unnutritious dishes very rarely -- perhaps once a month.

Use Your Child's Favorite Healthy Dishes. Do make sure that the dishes are ones that your child loves. Whole wheat spaghetti with tomato sauce may be a favorite of your child. Sneak some finely chopped spinach or broccoli in the tomato sauce.

Let the Flavor Stand Out. Make sure your child can taste the flavor of the healthy food. It doesn't have to stand out, but your child should have at least an unconscious awareness of the taste. Your goal is to make the taste of the healthy food familiar to your child, because children like familiar foods better.

After a Few Hides, Let Your Child Taste the Food on Her Own. Don't always hide the healthy food in dishes. Once you have "snuck" the food into your child's favorite dish a few times, present the food on its own, or as the main ingredient of a dish. Your child may now like the food because it has a familiar taste.

When it's successfully done, "hiding" food means gradually introducing it to your child, in a way that she will accept. It doesn't mean "fortifying" your child's junk food with a few tablespoons of vegetables.

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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Feeding Your Child Healthy Food Now Can Help Him Years Later

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

Wendy Oddy and her colleagues at Perth's Telethon Institute for Child Health Research have done some interesting studies finding that children who are fed healthy food have lower rates of anxiety and ADHD when they become teenagers.

I'm concentrating this blog on HOW to teach children the taste of healthy foods, not WHY they should eat healthy foods. But sometimes, when your child seems to be taking weeks to learn to like Brussels sprouts, or your mother-in-law is insisting that your kids eat sweets because it will "give them energy to grow", it's nice to know that the effort you are making today may make a huge difference in your child's life later on.

Keep with it!

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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Teach Your Child to Like the Taste of Fresh Food

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

Strawberries picked right off the vine, bread still warm from the oven, steak sizzling from the grill. There’s something truly delicious about fresh food.

Fresh foods are delicious, and also nutritious. Most plants lose nutrients after they’ve been picked. The tastes of old food – rancidity, rottenness, staleness – tend to repel people. The reason for this is obvious. Old food is low in nutrients and high in microbes.

The taste of fresh food can be a powerful ally. One of your child’s greatest enemies in his food education is processed food. Processed food companies have perfected foods that are bland, sugary, fatty, and that appeal to children. As with cigarettes, if children learn to like processed foods when they are young, they will be buying similar processed food when they are adults. The processed food companies will have a customer for life.

However, processed food companies cannot duplicate the taste of fresh produce and home cooked meals because their food is not fresh. Even the newest foods in the supermarket have probably been away from the factory for at least a week.

Processed food companies try to make up for the lack of real food taste by appealing to the sweet-fat-bland tastes. Even though the food doesn’t really taste good, children who are fed processed food learn to like the insipid flavors because they are familiar, and because they associate them with the food’s addictive qualities.

If you feed your child fresh, tasty food, he will find the processed food repugnant. Since most processed food is unnutritious and has repetitive ingredients, this repugnance will help him avoid some of the biggest nutritional enemies in our modern culture.

Fruits and vegetables taste especially good when they are fresh. Children who balk at lifeless supermarket broccoli may love the vivid taste of fresh picked broccoli.

Tips and Techniques

Most of your meals should be home-cooked. If you aren’t skilled in cooking, you can learn by doing – start with a few easy recipes and slowly increase your repertoire.

Find recipes that are quick and easy. Quickly sautéing some vegetables and adding some eggs and cheese to make scrambled eggs with vegetables doesn’t really take much longer than microwaving a breakfast meal.

Eat at restaurants that serve real, fresh food from basic ingredients. Avoid fast-food restaurants (you don’t want to teach your child to like the taste of fast food) and cheap chain restaurants (they often have processed ingredients delivered to them).

Use the freshest vegetables that you can. Buy local produce in season. Go to a farmer’s market.

Sign up for community supported agriculture. With community supported agriculture, you buy a share of a farm at the beginning of the growing season. Each week, you’ll receive a delivery of tasty fresh vegetables.

Experiment with growing your own vegetables. Nothing is tastier than fresh peas or tomatoes off the vine.

Want to learn more techniques?
25 Ways to Get Your Child to Love Vegetables

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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