First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. Bee Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ sight of vegetables nauseated her. This woman wasn’t stupid. She had not failed to comprehend that vegetables are healthy. She got it; but the roots of her behaviour lay elsewhere, deep in the past.

      Apart from the health implications of eating such a limited diet, it is socially awkward. Any meal in an unfamiliar setting is fraught with potential embarrassment. I spoke to another neophobic woman who said that whenever friends suggested a meal out, she had to call ahead to the restaurant to confirm that they could cook her a plain hamburger with absolutely no condiments. She ate no vegetables, though she was training herself slowly to like some fruits. When I asked why she disliked vegetables so much she laughed ruefully and said, ‘I think when I was about three, my mum got fed up with me being so fussy, so she decided to let me just have the things I liked.’ Which meant processed meats, chips and not much else.

      The belief that tastes are a facet of personality – or genes – has dangerous consequences. If you think that children are born with certain inbuilt likes and dislikes – as fixed as eye colour – you may make no attempt to change them, because what’s the point? In a 2013 journal article called ‘Why Don’t They Like That? And Can I Do Anything about It?’ nutritionists interviewed sixty Australian parents about their children’s likes and dislikes.⁵³ They found that parents of children who had unhealthy eating habits were much more likely to think there was little parents could do to influence their offspring’s tastes, because children were just born to be difficult eaters or not.

      The parents of healthy eaters made very different comments. They talked about how a child’s tastes were not ‘set in stone’. One of the mothers said it was possible to ‘educate’ the taste buds of children by exposing them to lots of different foods. Compared to the parents of unhealthy or neophobic eaters, parents of healthy eaters had a much stronger belief in their own power to influence a child’s likes and dislikes. Because they believed their actions had an impact on the children, these parents did their best to create a food environment where the children could develop enough healthy likes for a ‘balanced diet’. Conversely, the parents of the unhealthy eaters thought there was nothing they could do; and so, from the sound of things, they had more or less given up.

      You could, of course, read this study in a different way. Not all children are equally easy to feed and there is undoubtedly a temperamental (and genetic) aspect to neophobia. Some toddlers are very much more reluctant to attempt new foods than others, no matter what parenting they receive. Maybe the parents of the healthy eaters chose to attribute their child’s good habits to their influence when really it was just luck (or genes). It’s easy to believe there is no such thing as genetic fussiness when your children eat well. When you are trapped in daily battles with a finicky toddler, enduring porridge thrown in the face and cauliflower on the floor, it can be irksome to listen to the smug parents whose children will ‘try anything – celeriac’s her favourite!’. Maybe the neophobic children really were harder to influence than the non-neophobic healthy eaters.

      Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that the parents of the healthy eaters were right. Even if some of us take longer to warm up to vegetables than others, likes and dislikes are not predetermined. In most cases, it is perfectly possible not just to persuade children to eat vegetables – but to love them.

      Dr Lucy Cooke spends her days trying to figure out how children’s dislike of vegetables can be reversed. Cooke’s research⁵⁴ – in collaboration with colleagues at University College London, notably Jane Wardle – makes her hopeful that our genetic inheritance for food preferences can be overcome. After all, she herself was once a child who didn’t like vegetables, and now she is a slim, confident person who positively enjoys healthy eating, although she tells me one day at a pavement café over toasted teacakes and mint tea that she does sometimes feel deprived to think of all the foods she could eat and doesn’t. ‘But one mustn’t say that!’

      In Cooke’s view, the enterprise of weaning children onto solid food should be managed with a view to setting them up with healthy likes for life. When children actually enjoy vegetables – plus a range of whole foods from all the other nutrient groups – half the battles over dinner disappear. Most parents see the aim of feeding as getting as much wholesome food into a child as possible. We focus too much on short-term quantity – kidding ourselves that if they are pacified with enough baby rice they’ll sleep better – and not enough on building long-term tastes. ‘The only mums we see who talk about developing a child’s palate are French,’ in Cooke’s experience.

      From four to seven months, it seems that there is a window when humans are extraordinarily receptive to flavour, but by following current guidelines on exclusive breastfeeding, parents tend to miss it.⁵⁵ Several studies have shown that when vegetables are introduced at this age, babies are more open-minded. It takes fewer exposures to persuade them to like a new flavour and the effects are long-lasting. When seven-month-old babies in Germany were exposed to a vegetable purée that they particularly disliked – such as spinach or green bean – it took only seven attempts for them to like it as much as their once-preferred carrot purée.⁵⁶ Two months later, all but 10 per cent of the children still enjoyed the once-hated vegetable, even though they had now reached an age of greater wariness. The flavour window is only fully open for a short time and seems to decline even from four to six months. A 2014 study found that when babies were introduced to a single vegetable at six months – pea purée – they ate significantly less of it than babies who were introduced to a range of purées at four months.⁵⁷

      For this reason, Cooke disagrees with the 2001 directive from the World Health Organization (WHO) that said babies should be offered an exclusive diet of breast milk for six months, with no additional solid food. This WHO report forms the basis of official guidelines to mothers in most countries, even though the statistics it was based on were mostly from the developing world, where the risks of moving away from exclusive breastfeeding before six months – such as an increased chance of gastroenteritis and faltering growth – outweigh the benefits. In rich countries, however, the norm is for most mothers to stop breastfeeding, exclusive or otherwise, well before six months. In the UK just 1 per cent of mothers are still exclusively breastfeeding at six months after birth.⁵⁸ In the US it is 18.8 per cent.⁵⁹ The main effect of the official guidelines is to hold back many formula-fed babies from experiencing any flavour except for milk from four to six months. Here, the real risk is in producing children with limited tastes who will be set up for a lifetime of unhealthy eating. As so often, we fail to see the long-term picture.

      It’s not that a four-month-old baby is likely to grow any better in the short term when their diet includes a spoonful here and there of veg. It’s that waiting until six months to wean is to miss two months in which a child could be tasting different vegetables every day, preparing them for a recognition – and hence liking – of those same vegetables at a later stage.

      The second mistake parents make – and they are encouraged to do this by those baby feeding guides with their brightly organized charts of first foods – is starting children off with bland, honeyed tastes, such as carrot, butternut squash and sweet potato. Start with those vegetables that are naturally sweet, urges the UK’s bestselling author on baby food and save stronger flavours for later.⁶⁰ The really useful thing, however, would be to get a baby used to more bitter or challenging vegetables: cauliflower, courgette, spinach, broccoli, even sprouts. Weaning guides often advise sticking to a single vegetable for a whole week before switching – for fear of food allergies – but Cooke advocates lots of variety and daily changes to maximize exposure before the child enters the age of neophobia. When novel vegetables are offered to a six-month-old, the baby will often make the most dramatic expressions of horror and woe, screwing up the mouth and nose in ways that, on an adult face, would suggest torture. The hardest thing for parents is to press on with offering the food. ‘We have to persuade mums to ignore the face,’ explains Cooke. Unlike Clara Davis, who wanted to see how babies would eat away from parental influence, Cooke has devised pragmatic experiments recognizing that parents are part of the feeding process. Her starting point is always СКАЧАТЬ