Apparently, you make them start early. This is from a new experiment at the University of Leeds, also covered here via the BBC. Here’s the money line from there:
“Even if your child is fussy or does not like veggies, our study shows that five to 10 exposures will do the trick.”
Nice. The format of the study was 332 children aged 4 months-38 months given different exposures of vegetables (all done in European countries) and then, essentially, seeing whether they “cleaned their plate.” The other big takeaway was that children older than 24 months (2 years) are much more reluctant to pick up new food choices.
This whole situation obviously varies by country / availability of vegetables / parenting styles, but there is a strong future alignment here: essentially, one-third of the world is currently obese, so if we could get people interested in slightly healthier food choices when they’re not actually the ones making the food choices, maybe that could help a little bit.
