Picky eaters and the hidden vegetable controversy
I’ll start this post with a confession. My three year old still eats baby food. Not just sometimes. Not just for fun. He will literally only eat fruits and vegetables if they are pureed or juiced. Or if they are well hidden. To some extent, I’m thrilled that he eats baby food. A lot of kids his age refuse fruit and vegetables outright in any form and he is getting about 5 or 6 servings of fruits and vegetables each day (2 of which are juice, 3 to 4 of which are puree).
The “I don’t eat vegetables” problem
I have a book that I like a lot called Fit Kids. It is written by 3 doctors and published by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. It has great guidelines on fitness and nutrition for kids in general and for each age group . In the preschooler section, there is a question and answer that is quite typical of what I have read in a lot of places:
Q: My four-year old just will not try new foods. I’m at my wits’ end. Should I give up?
A: Research shows it may take as many as ten tries before a child accepts a new food. So if your child doesn’t seem to like a new food, don’t give up. Never force or bribe a child to eat, and don’t make a big issue out of it if your child chooses not to eat. By presenting the new food over and over again, you increase the chances your child will try it. Eventually, your child may try the food and might even like it.
That sounds so idyllic. So easy. Just keep offering. Don’t pressure. Your child will come around. It reminds me of the people that say breastfeeding is natural and easy. Every mother can breastfeed and every baby can nurse. Yes, breastfeeding is important. It is the best thing for the baby. But it doesn’t mean it is easy for everyone all of the time. Same thing with getting fruits and vegetables into a preschooler.
My son will refuse to sit at the table and refuse to eat anything else on his plate if there is a vegetable on it. Even if it isn’t touching the rest of the food. He almost has a nervous breakdown in restaurants if they put a little piece of lettuce on the plate with his meal and it has to be swiftly removed before the meltdown happens. If we do convince him to try something, he is likely to gag and end up vomiting up the rest of his meal. Not only does he have an issue with what is on his plate, but he also complains about what is on my plate sometimes: “Mommy, can you move your strawberries because I can’t eat my bagel when I can smell your strawberries“.
I struggle with this issue a lot. I think that a healthy, balanced diet is important. I would like for our family to eat more whole foods and less processed stuff. But at the same time as ensuring healthy nutrition now, I want to instill in my children a healthy relationship to food. And I know that forcing them or bribing them to eat something that they don’t want to eat is libel to give them an unhealthy relationship to food and also hurt our relationship and trust at the same time.
My three-part strategy
So what do I do?
First, I give my son baby food. As I said above, at least he’s eating the fruits and vegetables. I don’t send baby food to preschool with him (I don’t need him being made fun of), but I do send fruit puree snacks that you can buy for kids lunches. His aversion to fruits and vegetables seems to be mostly a texture thing (which is why pureeing works), but also partly a taste thing (he doesn’t like strong tastes).
Second, I hide vegetables in food that he will eat. This is a practice that has been debated widely among parenting groups and nutrition experts. This great article from the LA Times, Parents seek ways to make kids eat vegetables, does a great job explaining both sides of the story. Basically, parents say that if their kids are refusing to eat vegetables, at least they will be getting the nutrients from them if they are hidden in other foods. Nutritionists say that these children will never learn to appreciate the taste of the vegetables (because they are masked) and will not understand the importance of eating vegetables (because as far as they are concerned, they don’t eat them). Some of the recipes and products out there with hidden vegetables have also been criticized for having very low vegetable content along with high fat, high sugar and high sodium content.
Third, although I don’t put them on his plate, I do offer vegetables to him at every meal. Maybe one day he’ll agree to try.
Slowly coming out of hiding
To try to address the criticism of nutritionists of the hidden vegetable approach and slowly move towards a situation where we can all eat the same meal, I am trying to progressively bring the vegetables out of hiding. I started by hiding very small amounts and then increased them with time. I started out adding the hidden vegetables as puree and worked up to grating them and then chopping them finely and then adding slightly larger chunks. I used to peel the zucchini so that there wouldn’t be any green bits in it, and then worked up to leaving half of the peel on, and then later all of the peel. Sometimes I go too far and he refuses to eat, but sometimes I am happily surprised by his progress.
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[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI’ll start this post with a confession. My three year old still eats baby food. Not just sometimes. Not just for fun. He will literally only eat fruits and vegetables if they are pureed or juiced. Or if they are well hidden. To some extent, I’m thrilled that he eats baby food. A lot of kids his age refuse fruit and vegetables outright in any form and he is getting about 5 or 6 servings of fruits and vegetables each day (2 of which are juice, 3 to 4 of which are puree). The “I don’t eat vegetables” problem I have a book that I like a lot called Fit Kids. It is written by 3 doctors and published by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. It has great guidelines on fitness and nutrition for kids in general and for each age group . In the preschooler section, there is a question and […] [...]
If you give kids fruits before vegetables, it’s hard to get them interested in vegetables after the sweetness of fruit.
I think it is a big mistake to “hide” fruits and vegetables in kid’s food. It does not develop good food habits for the future. I have presented my approach in my new book.
I think it is possible to never have to say “eat your vegetables again.” There is no doubt that the foundation of a healthy diet and weight control is the significant consumption of vegetables and fruit. Unfortunately, many adults do not like these fine foods – so we must make sure kids don’t develop these attitudes. That’s why I wrote “The ABC’s of Fruits & Vegetables and Beyond.” I hope parents and teachers interested in getting kids to develop friendly feelings towards fruits and vegetables should take a look at it. Out only a few months and already being bought in quantity for class use. I wrote it for kids of different ages as it is two books in one – children first learn their alphabet through produce poems and then go on to more mature activities. It is coauthored by best-selling food writer David Goldbeck (me) and Jim Henson writer Steve Charney. HealthyHighways.com
Thanks for your comment David. Given how sweet breastmilk is and since that is the best choice (and hopefully the more prominent one these days), I have trouble with the idea that giving fruit first will create a sweet tooth.
In any case, my son refuses fruits and vegetables equally (unless it is a puree, and then he’ll eat either). And my daughter eats both of them equally (loves all fruits and veggies). Both of them had banana as a first food.
Dr. Whitney Anderson, pediatrician and cofounder of Full Tank Foods knows of this problem all too well. Eight out of ten kids don’t get enough veggies and that is why she and her husband started Full Tank Foods-www.fulltankfoods.com. Full Tank makes frozen veggie enriched (no secret) favorites like Macaroni & Cheese, Pasta & Red Sauce, Pizza Fondue and Cheesy Mashed Potatoes in a pocket sandwich. Full Tank encourages parents to try the real veggies first, but if a child refuses, these products can solve that problem and provide the nutrition the child needs.
Parents of kids with sensory issues also fight this battle. It can be very difficult to provide the nutrition they need due to an increased sensitivity to taste, smell, texture and even color! Veggies pretty much cover all these senses. Full Tank veggie enriched kid favorites offers a solution for these kiddos as well.
[...] 22, 2008 by phdinparenting As a follow-up to my post on Picky Eaters and the Hidden Vegetable Controversy, I thought I would share my home grown recipe for hidden vegetable pasta sauce. The ground beef is [...]
[...] 26, 2008 by phdinparenting Our son who has refused to try any fruit or vegetable (other than baby food) for years, now eats spinach! The kudos for getting him to try goes to Daddy [...]
I am so with you on this one. I “used” to be “it’s the parents” and how they are introducing foods all wrong and yada, yada, yada. However, now I’m dealing with a child that refuses to TASTE food.
Child #1 – I breastfed, introduced foods slowly and after 6 months. I made my own baby food and made it more and more “adult-like” as he got older. He has always been a champion eater. Will always try a new food and will even go so far to REVISIT a food he used to not like to see if he still doesn’t like it. I was so proud. It was all about how I did it right. Well… I shouldn’t have been so sure.
Child #2 – I breastfed, I tried to introduce food at 6 months, nothing.. 7 months, 8 months, 9 months – I made a visit with the pediatrician. My well seasoned doctor said to not push it and to let him decide when he wanted to start eating. As long as he was growing normally, let him be. Fine. At 11 months my son finally would eat bread, then cottage cheese, banana, cheerios, baked crackers and whole grain pancakes.
I tried EVERYTHING to get him to eat other foods – cut into shapes, starvation tactics, incentives, “one bite” rule, putting them on his plate and not expecting him to eat it and so on. He ALWAYS sits with the rest of us at meals, but he will not TRY foods. The foods he’s actually tried? He likes. Everything else is deemed inedible.
Just last night DH I tried the one bite rule with a bite of peach (a fruit he would devour last year, but has now forgotten it’s “food”) and he refused to eat, period. That got us to thinking about what he DOES eat. Everything with the exception of watermelon and sometimes green and red peppers is WHITE or brown food – toast, bread, sticky rice (won’t eat brown rice) chocolate nutrition bar, cake, cookies, pancakes (soy with flax), banana (only sometimes), apple (without peel), pizza crust, chinese spring roll, cottage cheese (which he now refuses to eat because he associates it with the flu and vomiting now), french fries, vanilla ice cream (no other flavor or topping), and battered/schnitzel pork or chicken – NOTHING else is allowed near his mouth or near his plate.
It is VERY HARD to be a family who is very much a whole grain, health conscious family to see a kid only eat ‘white’ foods and I would have been the LAST PERSON IN THE WORLD who would have said it was OK to deceptively hide veggies in brownies or the like, but you know what? SOME nutrition is better than NONE which is what we are facing now. The pediatrician again says to not force it and to just keep offering and says that he will outgrow it with time. Since my son also refuses vitamins (won’t eat candy either), the chocolate nutrition bar is his main source of nutrition, fiber and protein and vitamins. The ped says that’s OK for now and just keep trying.
So, my next tactic is to make white and brown food with veggies – cookies, brownies, battered, WHATEVER. After he bites it and accepts it, I will tell him what it is so that he begins to associate this flavor with food he sees and knows in other places. I did that with peanut butter the other day and it almost worked… got a bite out of a cracker with peanut butter at least.
If any of you know a great “white food” cookbook of things I might try or can think of veggies besides zucchini that can be made white, let me know!
I also like the idea of increasing the amount of veggies as I go along. The LAST thing I want to do is to make the few things he will now eat, inedible because now I’ve “ruined it” by trying to sneak things into it! He can’t afford to lose more foods!
Hi there,
To respond to Melissa’s post – there is the cookbook “http://www.deceptivelydelicious.com/site/” by Jerry Seinfeld’s wife, Jessica.
We have tried some of the recipes and they work; I have also made up some of my own veggie concoctions, since I now have a toddler who can get quite upset about certain foods being on his plate; it is very tough, and I will try anything to get him to eat healthy.
As for the people who say that the youngster will never learn to eat veggies for what they are (if they are kept hidden)…I am living proof that this is not true since I did not touch veg much into my late twenties (nevermind being a kid) and now there is not much that I will not eat (or at lest try.)
Keep on working at it. I know that I will.
Melissa – I have put pureed cauliflower in rice before and that worked quite well!
This is one of the many sites that I have been to for my very picky toddler. He has just turned three. He will not tough any meat, not even hot dogs or chicken nuggets. I don’t offer those because they aren’t healthy anyway. He will eat his dairy with no problem and loves bread so we make sure that it is multigrain and whole wheat. He will eat cracker and little juice snacks but they aren’t that healthy and he only gets them once in a while. Veggies and pastas, out of the question and he will eat apples and banana when he feels like it. I offer him food of all sorts everyday and his little brother is a wonderful eater and I am worried that this bad behaviour will rub off.
In the morning, he eats pancakes or french toast, maybe cheerios and milk.
His snacks include whole wheat crackers and cheese, usually a raisin and I will offer carrots or frozen peas and such. That is all he will eat until dinner time and I would assume that he would be hungry but not so much. During the day, he has two glasses of milk, water and two or three glasses of 100% Juice and water mixture. There is hardly any juice in it all.
Anyways, dinner, he will simply not eat anything unless I make him a peanut butter sandwich or cereal.
I know that there has to be an answer for me out there somewhere. I have been to a million websites. DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY INFORMATION ON HOW TO HIDE FOODS IN KIDS FOOD? I have tried, but the little monkey is very aware of texture and knows as soon as I add something.
Maybe some tricky secrets.
DO I NOT BREAK AND JUST LET HIM FEEL HUNGRY RATHER THAN GIVING HIM THE ABOVE OPTIONS? He has actually gone a whole day without eating, he called my bluff, he knew that I would eventually give in. His doctor says that he is fine and that he will grow out of it.
Help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@ M Lamothe
Our approach has been to continue to offer regular fruits and vegetables while still giving him the things he will eat. In my son’s case, he will eat pureed fruit and vegetables (baby food texture), so that is what I give him. But I also offer him what we are having at every meal and I do hide vegetables in foods that he will eat.
Pureed vegetables are the easiest thing to hide or things with similar textures to what your child is eating. I put squash in grilled cheese sandwiches. I put pureed carrot or other veggies into spaghetti sauce. Pureed cauliflower can be mixed easily with rice.
I have made wonderful french toast with pumpkin bread or zucchini bread. I often put fruit puree into pancakes (mashed banana works really well, but you can do others too).
There are several books (e.g. The Sneaky Chef) that have recipes for hiding fruits and veggies, but I used them more for ideas and then made up my own recipes that I knew would work for my child.
With time, I have been able to add some textures in here and there. I can make macaroni alfredo with bits of bacon and small chunks of roasted cauliflower. The texture of the pasta, colour of the sauce, and taste of the bacon completely mask the cauliflower.
Each child is different, so you just have to experiment with flavours he likes that can hide other flavours, textures and colours that are similar to what he will eat.
Good luck!
I also have a 3 1/2 year old who will not eat fruit or veggies. He gradually started refusing foods at 16 months and this included quitting nursing very suddenly. Since he had a mild dairy allergy, I was rather over worried about his intake of calcium.
The things he refuses now are:
- All vegetables apart from chip-shop chips – even McDonalds can’t tempt him now
- All fruit, apart from puree
- All pasta and rice, apart from “instant” ramen style noodles which he devours
- All meat apart from chicken nuggets or other shop bought breaded poultry shapes – my homemade oven baked ones do not go past his lips either
- Any kind of sauce
- Cheese
And a whole host of other things. He will, however, gobble up a bowl of porridge, especially when his nutty father covers it in sprinkles and stirs in a couple of cubes of dark chocolate.
As the other parents have said here, I’ve tried everything anybody has suggested without success. Forcefeeding, reward charts, eat-one-bit-for-a-bit-of-chocolate, starvation, hiding (even I didn’t like the taste of texture of the things I cooked!) have all failed to achieve any real changes. He now considers anything HE will eat as “not food” because his grandmother told him “yes, well, you don’t like food do you.”
However, I have also given up providing any alternative to the meals I cook apart from bread and butter, which is also the policy now at his preschool, where he will have two slices of bread and butter, three pieces of cake and a large bowl of custard… or two. This policy seems to have started to work, as I’ve also taken on board the statistics about kids needing to taste foods x number of times to start accepting them. I’ve spent the last few weeks cajoling him to taste pasta around four times a week. This has moved from hiding his little face in his hands in terror at the sight of it to being able to play with it a bit, kiss it, and now he is able to bite bits of and shove it in his mouth almost carelessly before spitting it back onto his plate. So now, along with his bread and butter, I can also provide a small bowl of whatever pasta I’ve put in the dinner for the rest of us, and he knows what is expected and does it quite happily and without the retching of previous attempts. I’m hoping that within a couple more weeks of gentle encouragement he may be able to chew and swallow a little macaroni and then I will start adding smears of sauce to it.
The rather shocking outcome of this is that while cutting up cherries for his 20m old brother (a lover of all things dinnery) my son announced loudly “I like cherries” and shoved his hand into the bag and bit into a cherry. He then carried on biting into the cut up cherries and pulling faces while agreeing that they really did taste quite good. None actually went down, but who cares! Progress is progress.
I am very comforted though when I meet dieticians and nutritionists who have picky eaters at their tables. Helps me feel a little bit better about my parenting skills!
But all in all, I think my only advice is that I’ve never heard of this problem being terminal. Kids who don’t eat vegetables grow into relatively healthy adults who may or may not eat vegetables, and it really seems not to be a reflection of the way foods were introduced to them as babies or any other things parents may feel guilty about. In converse, my cousin’s children were given a diet almost solely consisting of fries, cola and takeaway curries, kebabs and burgers as toddlers at home, but always devoured huge roast dinners at their grandmother’s house and seemed to almost crave the healthy foods.
But it is a huge pain in the butt.
So my current plans are threefold:
1) Continue serving relatively child-friendly meals for my family along with a side of bread and butter and allowing him to eat whatever he wants from that offering
2) Continue with cajoling him to be disgusting with pasta in the hope that he will eventually agree to swallow some
3) Work on some hidden vegetable recipes to get at least some nutritious foods into his growing little body
Anybody who has any healthy cookie or cupcake recipes which they’ve tried and tested including zucchini or carrot, please let me know!
I have spent many many sleepless nights over the lack of fruits and veggies that my son is getting. I have learned that I cannot worry when he refuses to eat dinner. I offer him what we eat and he refuses unless it is carb related. I have relied on a couple of cookbooks to help me through this frustrating time. “Deceptively Delicious” is a great easy to follow cookbook and “The sneaky Chef” is another great cookbook, although the prep time is a little longer. I feel so much better that at least my son is getting some veggies and fruits rather than none. I puree berries and put them in his milk every morning with his breakfast. I usually just buy the no sugar added frozed fruits and put them in baggies in the freezer and take them out as I need them.
I have come to the conclusion that taste is a matter of personality. My son has a sweet tooth and prefers foods that are sweeter and carbohydrates. I have had to learn to work with that. He doesn’t like different textures so instead of making him eat his spaghetti with noodles I put the sauce on a whole wheat bun and cut it up for him. He gobbles it up. His favorite thing to eat is homeade chicken fingers basted with broccoli, wheat germ and bread crumbs pan fried in olive oil (A favorite of my hubbies too!). He is a healthy two year old and I feel as long as I keep offering him the veggies and fruits in the raw form then one day he will accept them. For now, I hide the veggies and I know soon I will be able to use his sweet tooth against him. For example “you have to eat three more bites of supper before you get a brownie.” A brownie with hidden blueberries and spinach, I might add!
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