According to an American study, as soon as a child knows that a food is beneficial for health, he refuses to eat it, assuming that it will not taste good.
Don’t tell your kids anything before serving them spinach or carrots! They might not want to eat them …
An article to appear in the Journal of Consumer Research in October 2014, gives an explanation for this strange phenomenon: children assume that food will not be good, from the moment they have been told that it is beneficial to them.
Parents often tend to justify themselves before serving a healthy food, saying “it makes you stronger or smarter”, which Professor Ayelet Fishbach of the Booth school of Business of the University of Chicago, lead author of the study, strongly advises against it.
“Preschoolers think that food cannot serve two purposes, that it cannot be healthier and delicious at the same time,” says Ayelet Fishbach. “Therefore, explaining to them that carrots will make them grow taller or make them smarter or more lovable only results in them not wanting to eat carrots. If you want them to eat carrots, you should just feed them the carrots indicating that they are delicious or not saying anything. ”
To encourage children to eat healthy foods, it would be better to ignore the benefits.
Unprecedented experiment: researchers read stories to children
To reach these conclusions, the researchers performed five experiments with 270 preschool children, in which a researcher read illustrated stories of a child eating a snack. In some stories the little girl was interested in food because it was beneficial to her, in others she was interested in food because it was tasty, and in still others the reason for her choice was not stated.
Children ate more food when there was no reason for eating it or when the food was presented to them as tasty rather than when they thought the food was good for them.
What about teenagers?
Prof Ayelet Fishlbach explained that their study “focused on very young children and it should be borne in mind that older children may rely less on flavor when deciding what to eat. they are going to eat because of their greater self-control ”. “But, most of us know of teens who don’t eat more than six different foods, so it may turn out that they think the same way young children do.”
This simple tip may be worth it! Indeed, the benefits of the consumption of vegetables are regularly demonstrated. Against obesity, cancer, stroke, etc.
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