Culturally in America, we have such low expectations for our kids nutrition. Theres so much sugar in everything I find it nearly impossible to get them them to eat healthy. Mac n cheese, chicken nuggets, pizza, peanut butter and jelly seem like the standard set in America. also my kids get offered cookies and ice cream , chips and all sorts of garbage at their friends house.
We feed kids this stuff because its convenient and they like it, but i cant help but think that if everybody just had higher expectations, then all kids would eat healthier.
Does anyone else have this experience?
What healthy meals/foods do you get your kids to eat?
Why is it so hard to get kids adults to eat healthy food?
Adults are no different. We humans are just hardwired to like high calorie and salty foods. Adults are generally a bit more rational, and can sometimes choose the healthy option.
Judging by the obesity epidemic all over the world though, that rational part is not strong enough for most people.
It must start from the beginning. No need to offer any processed food to a young child. Then when st parties or other celebration, it’s not a big deal to have snacks as they eat proper food as meals at home. Also, blend vegetables into homemade pasta sauce, curry sauce etc. make juices snd smoothies and include some raw vegetables like spinach or kale. Raspberries and a bit of honey cover the taste of the vegetables. When they have a taste for it and are used to the feeling of a nutritious diet they will seek it out. Also, only water to drink at home.
Because food is big business and companies compete to create the most palatable, mouth satisfying foods. It’s not prossed food anymore, it’s ultra processed.
I worry it’s going to get worse. Baby food now is ultra smooth and creamy. No texture at all. And if it is in the pouches, babies are looking at it or smelling it Babies/toddlerhood is when kids need to be exposed to lots of sensory input to become ok with them. As this ultra smooth baby food is the norm, kids will be more resistant to trying new foods. They are use to everything looking and feeling the same and their sensory system relies on that.
If you spend 6 months-3 years eating food pouches and then someone puts some green peas on your plate, your brain will panic. Do it enough times and your parents will take the peas away, thus enforcing the panic.
I work for a school . We give out extra snacks to those kids who want /need them. There are many kids already who won’t eat a sliced apple if there is a hint of brown, but will suck back an applesauce squeeze pack that they can’t see.
Ultra processing is a scary problem. But it’s not going away. Its here to stay now. I also don’t know what to do about it.
Reading most of the kids/toddler American recipes is a bit weird. Kids in my country just eat what adults do (minus spicy stuff). So as a toddler they don’t have funky fun food, if the adults eat roasted veggies and some chicken they eat the same only smaller portions. Soup is also a staple on every meal since starting solids and into adulthood. The fact that they are exposed to spices, textures since a young age helps I believe. Not saying it’s.perfect here we are getting a surge of child obesity but it’s also linked to a more sedentary lifestyle.
It’s hard bc parents mostly shrug their shoulders and assume their kids will grow into eating broccoli. You can teach your children to love vegetables. I worked with a family that was vegan and their children’s favorite dinner foods were brussel sprouts, teriyaki tofu, and radishes. And yes, they ate candy and chocolate like everyone else.
Also want to add that honestly most people in America do not know how to cook veggies. Steaming them or slathering them in ranch is the worst way to get kids into eating them. They should be sauteed or roasted.
Generally if you normalize food and have a variety immediately with your kids, they do not have issues eating healthy foods. I know tons of toddlers who crunch on bell peppers and love salmon, mostly because their parents do this too and there’s nothing abnormal about it in their home. They also enjoy Dino nuggets and Mac n cheese.
My friends who have shit diets and don’t eat healthy food have kids who eat the same. They feed them mostly carbs and prepackaged foods, lots of “kids microwave meals”, corn, breaded meats, fried carbs, etc.
Your kids diet is mostly a reflection of your own.
Chicken pot pie, beef stew, taco pasta, pulled pork sliders, homemade pizza night, Greek chicken kabobs, bbq chicken with rice, chicken or beef and bean tacos….I make all of this stuff at home and use my own seasonings. I use whole grain pastas and breads. Olive oil and salt used sparingly. Lots of frozen veggies thrown in meals or as sides. Water and milk to drink. It’s the highly processed packaged versions of these foods that are less healthy. Finding ways to prepare “unhealthy “ meals to healthy versions at home is key.
Think about what some of those foods you listed have. Peanut butter, chicken, cheese… sources of protein, calcium, iron. We tend to side-eye a lot of cereal at the store, but many of those items are fortified with nutrients, such as vitamin d and calcium (and they are shelf stable).
Now that may seem silly, but you also have to understand that children cannot afford to miss key nutrients like you can - you can get away with a lot of things, as an adult who is already developed. but when it comes to small children, if it’s going to be a battle between eating “junk” with with at least some nutrition, versus no food at all, it’s gonna have to be the “junk.”
The more money you have, the more you have access to having a healthy diet, but not everyone has that luxury and they have to rely on things like the above
Kids will eat what you give them, first and foremost. but at the same time, most of us do not have the time nor the wherewithal to argue and try and reason with a toddler. For many families, it’s either that they eat, or they don’t eat. Sometimes that means eating the Mac and cheese, or the peanut butter sandwich. Believe me there are way worse options out there, like eating nothing.
Not to mention there are ways to sneak veggies into sauces and such. Mac and cheese is one of those things, same with pasta sauce in general, where you can do that and the kid won’t really know
If you don’t want your child eating chips, cookies and ice cream, that’s a conversation you will need to have with their parents. But at the same time, there is no harm in the simple existence of these things, what matters is the amount and how frequently they eat it.
> If we had higher expectations
Well, to be honest with you - if we had higher expectations, then we would be lot lot lot more focused on making sure kids can eat first. A very large number of kids go hungry in the US, so much so that we now have breakfast programs (which was not around when I was a kid). and a lot of the foods that some of the parents of these kids have access to, processed, or highly processed, and we shame these parents which, if you were to ask me personally we would not do that, if we had higher expectations
Kids learn from their parents. If the parents give kids crap food from a small age it’s what they know. I was raised in a poor family and didn’t have access to a lot of whole foods so I had to learn to eat better as I got older. My youngest kid likes some junk food but loves eating fruit, vegetables and other whole foods because it’s what I ate and would give her as a toddler. As for my first born, I had her at a young age and didn’t take nutrition as seriously as I did when I got a little older. She became picky with healthy food because she wasn’t used to it.
In my experience, it is all about what you start them out with as soon as they can eat solid food. My wife is a healthy eater, started my daughter out on the good stuff from square one. Kiddo eats like my wife, and rarely asks for junk food. 13 years old now, and when we go out to eat, never shows any desire for soda, etc. Now all I need to do is get on the same page as the two of them. Anyway, key is to get them on the right track right off the bat, and just not make crap available early on. Granted, it isn’t easy to do, but it is possible. If crap isn’t in the fridge and on the table, I’m convinced they just never really develop the craving for it.
It is to the point where if I offer my daughter a donut, for example, she’ll say no thank you and proceed to grab a few cherry tomatoes instead.
You’re getting many answers regarding the economic and cultural aspects. There is also wisely thought to be a survival instinct in young kids to have a strong aversion to bitter tastes, prevalent in leaves and green vegetables. This is supposed to protect them from eating any poisonous leaves or grass while they’re very young, in the hunter-gatherer eons during when we evolved. If mommy puts you down for a second to grab some nuts or kill an antelope, and you stuff poisonous leaves into your mouth, that’s the end of the bloodline.
The healthy stuff is packed with micronutrients, yes, but evolutionary, the point of eating food is mostly to get as much energy (fat, sugar, complex carbs) as possible to not starve and not to eat anything poisonous. Kids are thus designed to detect high energy food well and will avoid greens that may or may not be safe to eat and hardly have any energy anyways.
Main reasons I see?
People make excuses that our ancestors certainly would not allow. You control what your children eat.
Extreme marketing towards kids. Yeah, there are laws against it, but mcdonalds ads are 100% tryna suck children in. The market today is mostly the same as “smoking is healthy.” Hell, even the vegan nonsense is this way, people taking from Dr Greger, the god of health… yeah, right.
Government guidelines and general blabber are being funded by junk food and fast food companies. As soon as the government had involvement in dietary advice, it all went downhill.
Addiction and denial of said addiction.
Feeding your child meat, fruit, potatoes, eggs, etc, is easy since they like food meant to make em grow. They eat or starve, worked with plenty of generations before us. Somehow, there’s a delusion that this is child abuse? Giving a 5 year old any soda or fruit juice is direct abuse.
Habit, when you get used to eating unhealthy it’s hard to stop but if you make it a habit to eat healthy it gets easier along the way.
When you get used to eating a lot of sugar you only want more and more but after not eating it for a while you stop craving it.
According to articles I’ve read on the topic, parents need to model vegetable eating behavior, especially (if present) the father.
Anecdotally, my Indian neighbor asked why kids in the US don’t like vegetables, as that wasn’t something she’d encountered in India or with her kids. It seems like palatability is also at play. Kids are often more sensitive to bitter, so American style steamed veggies with salt may be more than just unappealing.
Back in the day, mom would pet them food down and you ate. There was no debating if you liked what she gave you. You just ate or you sat until you did. When we had kids, we got creative with some foods to get them to eat veggies but for the most part, I used the same formula my parents did.
Healthy food is one of the biggest advantages you can give anyone because they won’t have any addictions in early developing life when the rest of the country is drowning in them. Healthy food teaches self-control and a diet of healthy foods increases the amount of gut bacteria that eat those foods which will change your tastebuds so you mentally prefer those foods and further ignore foods like sugar that is not preferred by the prevalent bacteria
its a positive feedback loop but it works the same way with addictive foods which is why they become addictive
I can say with confidence, there are foods I didn’t eat until I was into my 20’s because I thought I didn’t like them. Turns out mom wasn’t a good cook.
Use seasoning, make something they DO like paired with something new so they are more willing to try it.
Get them involved in the cooking process.
Give the option a and option b, even if they don’t really like either option they still have a choice and are more likely to eat it.
It’s not hard if you start early, model healthy eating, and are consistent with their diet. I’ve seen babies eating things i never thought babies would eat, like kale, quinoa, and asparagus, because their parents knew how to prepare them and ate the same things to show that they were good. But babies are already so much work, so it’s hard to do everything right.
Because they’ve tasted the unhealthy stuff that’s out there and it tastes better.
It’s not impossible to get them to eat healthy. Eat healthy or go to bed hungry. They’ll get hungry enough, eventually. Fortunately it’s never come to that in our home.
When my daughter was younger, we used to make a game out of it. We told her that green beans would make her fast. She’d eat a green bean and then run to the other end of the kitchen and back as fast as she could, eat another and see if she got faster. She did that for a long time. She still likes green beans quite a bit.
And for whatever reason, she had a love of pinto beans like I’ve never seen. She used to go through about a pound bag+ of pinto beans a week.
But, you know, I’d make dinner, it would have a main course and we always had 3-4 vegetables on the side. She was expected to finish the vegetables. If anything was left uneaten, it wasn’t the vegetables. That was the rule.
She still doesn’t like a lot of those vegetables, but she still has to eat them.
My parents never had this problem with me. I ate everything as a kid. I didn’t like sweets, but man I loved real food. My mother was a great cook, which helped (in fact, every descendant of my maternal grandmother is a good cook, all 25+ of us, including my 12 year old daughter. Cooking was always a big part of life in our family.)
The hyper-palatable sugary processed foods are blowing out everyone’s palates. Even a piece of modern fruit which is already selectively bred over generations to be hyper sweet, taste like garbage if you’ve been eating candy and poptarts all week.
I don’t have kids, but I would like to have them involved with picking out meals, helping with the grocery shopping, smelling the herbs and spices to determine which goes on the foods, doing some age-appropriate meal prepping and cooking. I feel like they would feel empowered instead of always being dictated on what they will be eating.
Sugar is found in baby formula so babies are literally conditioned to like sweet stuff from day 1. Kids nursery rhymes like to cast candy, doughnuts and other fast food and as “sweet”, “tasty” and “delicious”. This makes kids curious and you would regularly see them on grocery stores or gas stations ask their parents if they could have some “Doritos”, “dunkin doughnuts” or a “Coca-Cola”. Thus creating a full- fledged drug addiction for toddlers
First 3 years of my kids life no additional sugar food or drinks. As they got older 5 or so we would go family parties and all the kids would rush to sweets but mine they would rush to veggies. Parents would go how did you do that I can’t even get our kids to like veggies
It’s not, you just have to start them very young and set an example. Don’t buy trash and kids won’t eat trash.
Ever since my kid could eat solid foods, he only eats what we eat. There’s no making “kids food” in addition to whatever dinner is made for the night. My kid is 3 years old and crushes a wide variety of cuisines. Sushi, chicken paprikash, broccolini, brussel sprouts, laab, chopped salad, roasted sweet potatoes and the list goes on. Kids love to be adventurous, but it’s up to the parents to assist in the exploration.