Picky eaters: Here’s how you can get your child to eat anything

As a parent, majority of my time is spent coming up with different ways to get my baby to eat. So, food morsels are carefully weighed, measured and presented (to ensure it doesn’t result in projectile throwing up incidents), food is turned into flying aeroplanes and what not. We know it’s a task to get these picking eaters to eat that pasta.

So, this study might actually be helpful for many parents sailing in the same boat. Star-shaped bread is popular with children and can encourage healthier eating. The study, by European Association for the Study of Obesity, stated focusing on taste and product attractiveness might help children and their parents make healthier food choices.

In children, increased fibre consumption is related to healthier eating and better health outcomes, whereas the opposite is true for high salt consumption. Therefore, in this study, a visually attractive whole-grain bread was developed based on published health recommendations for salt and fibre, and then children evaluated the bread based on its shape, symmetry and colour.

Here are some other ways to make food attractive for children:

1) Children love colourful food. So, add as many different coloured vegetables such as peppers, zucchini, tomatoes to the bowl.

2) Attractive cutlery: Does you child prefer a superhero or love a cartoon character. Try to get cutlery with their favourite character’s print on it.

3) Play with presentation: Who’d like the same old bowl of porridge everyday? Play with different ways of presenting food. For instance, vegetables can be cut up and put on a small toothpick. Of course, monitoring is very important.

4) Add more shapes: Use cookie cutters for different shapes like star, circle, squares etc.

(With inputs from ANI)

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