HONG KONG: The taste of vegetables can grow on your children from an early age, new research has found.
If you want your children to eat vegetables, feed them a lot in first 15 days of weaning, a new study has found.
The University College London (UCL) research, revealed that starting British children on simple vegetables during the first 15 days of weaning makes them more willing to try, accept and like new vegetables.
Researchers asked mothers to introduce babies to five vegetables every day as first foods, repeated for a period of 15 days.
A month later, babies were introduced to an unfamiliar vegetable – artichoke puree. The vegetable was chosen because it is not included in baby food that’s readily available in British supermarkets and is rarely eaten by kids.
Researchers then measured how much they ate in grams and both researchers and mothers rated how much they appeared to like it on a scale of one to nine. One meant they hated it, nine meant they loved it and five meant they neither liked it or hated it.
The result was that babies in the intervention arm ate about twice as much (32.8 grams vs 16.5 grams) as the control babies. They also ‘liked’ it (6.7) whereas the control babies somewhat ‘disliked’ it (4.3).
The study, which was published by the British Journal of Nutrition, analysed the tastes of 56 mothers and babies.
Dr Alison Fildes, co-author of the report and an expert on food preferences with UCL, said: “The weaning period usually lasts five to seven months and children are very receptive to new tastes and we want to take advantage of that opportunity by introducing a variety of vegetables during that time.
