Children need to learn how to love healthy foods. First of all, pressure or imposing control is not effective. It only creates stress and makes the problem worse. Instead it goes with everything the parents do, eating healthy food, curiosity and enjoyment of new foods, pleasure of eating together, staying active. They should start by turning their home into a “safe and pleasurable environment” for eating.

One of the earliest and most important jobs parents have to do is exposing children to a wide variety of food. There are good chances that their kids are going to like high-fat, high-sugar things without any help, so it’s in their best interest that parents offer them the opportunities to learn to like other foods.

Many scientists agree that lifelong taste preferences and eating habits are directly linked to what and how we eat in our early years, possibly as early as within the womb. Studies suggest that as early as 13 weeks in the womb, the embryo can detect differences in amniotic fluid. “Even before birth”, says Dr.Leann Birch, an internationally recognized psychologist, chair of Pennsylvania State Universiy’s Department of Health and Human Development, “the fetus gulp rate of amniotic fluid in the womb increases”. This innate preference for sweetness helps explain why most infants initially prefer fruit to vegetables, which have a slightly bitter flavor.

According to Dr. Birch, the child’s taste preferences are further developed during breast-feeding, as flavors from the mother’s diet leads to a variety of flavors in her milk. Infants who are breast fed, particularly by a mother who eats a large variety of food, have wider preferences than bottle fed infants. The formula-fed baby experiences very little flavor variety. “This is consistent with animal studies showing that early exposure to variety leads to more acceptance of diversity later on” says Dr. Birch.

Transition to solid food at 5 to 6 month goes more smoothly for the breast fed infant because she is more open and sometimes eager to try new flavors. The little omnivore at that age has great olfactory and gustatory capabilities. The baby can detect a salty, sugary, sour and bitter taste. More than 10 000 gustatory papillae cover her tongue and differentiate the four flavors, a lot more than we own as adults (only 5000). Babies are basically better equipped to taste than we grown-ups are! They are also highly sensitive to textures and the visual aspect of their food.

But at the age of 2 or 3 and until 10, most kids become very conservative. They usually refuse to be seduced by unknown flavors. It might be because instinct tells us to refuse flavors like bitter and sour, typically associated with poisonous foods in nature (poisonous mushrooms taste bitter). This is a normal passage, we call it neophobic.

Should we wait until the crisis goes away and offer our kids only the dishes they like to eat and jeopardize their eating habits and taste for a long time, may be forever ? No, I don’t think it should be that way for three reasons: Man is by nature an omnivore and thus to stay healthy he needs to diversify his alimentation To grow up is to learn Eating is a pleasure that needs to be cultivated and that builds us as social humans.

For an infant to interpret a food to be safe and acceptable there has to be repeated exposure, particularly when we get to fruits and vegetables that aren’t naturally sweet. So offer your toddler and preschool age child a lot of different foods, even if they are neophobic, or quick to reject new foods. Remember that if children have repeated opportunities to sample new foods, then at least some of them will be accepted. That may mean that you have to offer a small teaspoon of green beans 15 times before your child will even try it.