If you want your baby to grow up liking vegetables, new research suggests a very simple route to success: soldier on. And ignore any pained faces you encounter along the way.
Even if a baby makes an unhappy face when given puréed greens, he or she will still eat a healthy portion of it, says researcher Julie Mennella, a bio-psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a non-profit independent scientific institute in Philadelphia, whose study appears in the journal Pediatrics this month.
Getting kids to eat their veggies is a significant goal in an era in which childhood obesity is a vexing North American health issue. Learning to favour certain flavours is a process that begins in infancy and continues to unfold throughout childhood, and Dr. Mennella's research suggests that as children grow up, their relationship with green beans and spinach will have little to do with knowing that vegetables are healthy.
"Putting up pictures of broccoli all over the house is not going to work," she says.
Neither will masking the taste of vegetables by tucking vegetable purées into recipes where they would not otherwise be. It's a practice recently made fashionable by celebrity mother Jessica Seinfeld and her book on the subject, Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food. She proposes sneaking puréed carrots and spinach into brownies, and cauliflower into macaroni and cheese.
While there are health benefits to such trickery, such as increasing fibre and reducing fat in recipes, "if the goal is to get the child to learn to like the taste of broccoli, they have to learn to taste it in a positive context," says Dr. Mennella.
Forty-five babies and their parents participated in the study. One group was fed green bean puree daily; the other group ate green beans followed an hour later by peach purée. Regardless of whether a baby was breast- or formula-fed, and regardless of whether a baby was fed peaches after the beans, both groups ate more beans after repeated exposure.
And those grimaces? They're real, but they don't bear any relation to whether a child will continue eating or not. Funny faces have an evolutionary history, Dr. Mennella says. First, babies are attracted to sweet and salty tastes, as markers of high-calorie foods. And when they encounter bitter tastes, they pull faces to tell their parents they may have tasted something toxic.
"It's instinctive," says Dr. Mennella. But with vegetables, if you offer the spoon again, "they'll still eat. You can't take the grimace and think, 'my baby doesn't like it.' "
She did say the babies fed peaches made fewer grimacing faces while eating beans, which suggests a potential association between a sweet pay-off after a bitter vegetable meal.
The study also reinforced earlier research that indicates a mother's diet during pregnancy and breastfeeding also plays a role. Eating more fruits and vegetables during those times adds to the likelihood that your baby will enjoy the same foods. But only if they face them on a regular basis once they're eating solids.
So, breast milk is more of a "flavour bridge" between pregnancy and solid food than a method of imprinting a preference, says Dr. Mennella.
"In order for a baby to learn to like the taste of the food, the baby has to taste it."