The Total Health Experience: Eat, Play, Learn
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It’s a common refrain: My kids won’t eat anything!
Many parents report feeling concerned, stressed, or guilty because of the struggle to feed their kids healthy foods, especially vegetables.[1] These are unsurprising, innate responses. The drive to ensure our children get enough to eat and eat a wide enough variety to meet their nutritional needs is instinctual. It is fundamental to being a parent. Anything that challenges our ability to feed our children can feel like a major threat to our most important duty.
Food insecurity—not having access to adequate nutritious food—is a part of that struggle, but only one part. In this article, we will explore dietary quality more than quantity. The fact is that people in the US and those in many other nations worldwide are more likely to suffer from a poor diet than from inadequate caloric intake, with the prevalence of obesity quickly overtaking the prevalence of underweight children worldwide.[2]
(Note that when we refer to diets or dietary quality in this article, we are not talking about the dietary regimens that one goes on for a short period, hoping to lose weight [e.g., the Atkins, Paleo, or ketogenic diets]. Instead, we use these words to refer only to the more basic meaning: the types of food and beverages we habitually consume.)
A recent study conducted by researchers at Tufts found that a majority of children and adolescents in the US have low-quality diets.[3] The coverage of the study notes some improvements in recent decades: between 1999 and 2016, the average American child consumed one-half a serving more of whole grains and one-fifth a serving more of fruit.[4] That’s essentially a couple bites of apple and one-half a slice of whole wheat bread—hardly something to write home about, especially considering that the intake of fruits and whole grains remains far below the recommended amounts.
The consequences of this low dietary quality are impossible to miss. As of 2020, nearly fifteen million US children aged two to nineteen were obese, a condition associated with numerous dangerous conditions both immediately and during adulthood, including diabetes, hypertension, depression, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.[5][6]
We should not pick on the US too much. While the US may seem to lead the way in many of these disturbing trends, unhealthy lifestyles have quickly caught on throughout the rest of the world. Just south of the US border, the prevalence of obesity in children has steadily increased for many years; as of 2021, more than 37 percent of school-age Mexican children were overweight or obese due to low dietary quality.[7]
What does this low dietary quality look like? Essentially, most children are eating fewer servings of the food we advocate for as part of the whole food, plant-based (WFPB) lifestyle (fruits, vegetables, and whole grains) and more of the food we recommend avoiding (highly processed plant fragments and animal products). Consequently, certain nutrient deficiencies are common, including iron and zinc, which can be obtained well from green leafy vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains.[8] Fiber deficiency has also reached epidemic proportions, although this deficiency is not something kids have a monopoly on: only 5 percent of men and 9 percent of women in the US consume adequate fiber, according to one recent study, and this deficiency contributes substantially to the global disease burden.[9][10]
This is an important theme that we will return to: the nutritional challenges facing children reflect those facing adults. Given the astronomically high rates of chronic disease and prescription drug use in the adult population, why would we expect anything better for our children?
You may have heard that many children today are expected to live shorter lives on average than their parents. The situation is probably more complex than how it is usually reported (isn’t it always?), given the effects of non-nutritional factors. For instance, life expectancy among younger populations in the US may be skewed by high death rates from suicide, gun violence, and drug use.[11] Nevertheless, poor nutrition contributes inordinately to the overall poor outlook facing children today. Even among the apparently children in the US who mature into adulthood and survive into old age, many will suffer for more than a decade from costly disabilities.[12]
The WFPB lifestyle supports better health outcomes at all ages, including during childhood. Numerous public health authorities, including the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND), have reiterated that animal products are unnecessary for children’s health and in fact contribute to disease and mortality.[13] Although some skeptics question how attainable the WFPB lifestyle is, research on dietary adherence has yielded promising results: numerous studies involving this type of diet at various levels of strictness have demonstrated impressively high adherence.[14]–[17] Research has also shown that lifestyle change does not have to be all or nothing to produce benefits; incremental change can also improve measures of dietary quality.[18]
Provided some degree of help and support, children are just as capable as adults of achieving the principles of the WFPB lifestyle. Helping them do so is not always easy, but thankfully there are many useful resources available. Our Plant-Based Nutrition Certificate program includes critical information about nutrition needs during childhood, and our cooking courses, hosted in CNS Kitchen, provide practical guidance. Here are some other articles you may find useful:
Specific guidelines for transitioning children to a WFPB lifestyle will depend on where you and your children are on your journeys. If you are all completely new to this way of eating, you might need more support. Likewise, starting out with a one-year-old will present different challenges from dealing with a teenager.
So, we have looked at the state of poor nutrition and offered an alternative. Children can thrive with a WFPB lifestyle, but most do not for the same reasons their parents do not. Food policies, formal recommendations like the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, lack of nutrition education and the resultant nutrition illiteracy, the seemingly inescapable dominance of convenience foods, and the influence of marketing are just a few of the forces that push us all, children and adults, toward unhealthy foods.
A few differences set children apart. Because they have less autonomy and are less mentally developed, they may struggle to exert their willpower as much as adults. Additionally, there are evolutionary reasons why children at a young age are especially susceptible to avoiding new foods for a short period (more on this shortly).[19]
Nevertheless, at the most basic level, children are exposed to unhealthy dietary patterns in much the same way as their parents. And yet, we often hear children described very differently. The way many parents talk about their kids, you might think that pickiness is inevitable, like a character trait, or that it must be outlasted. Is this idea supported by convincing evidence? It seems commonsensical that kids would have less refined palates than adults because of children’s more limited exposure to different types of food, but does this necessarily mean they will only want what is familiar and that we need to cater to their particular tastes until they age out of it? Again, what does the evidence suggest?
You might think the meaning of a term like pickiness is obvious. All the same, it can be helpful to look first at how researchers define it. A 2007 review writes this about picky eaters: “[They] are usually defined as children who consume an inadequate variety of foods through rejection of a substantial amount of foods that are familiar (as well as unfamiliar) to them [emphases added.]”[20] Note the emphasis on familiar versus unfamiliar food. This is critical for distinguishing between picky eating and food neophobia, which denotes only an aversion to trying new kinds of food.
Many, if not most, picky eaters display neophobic tendencies; that is, they avoid unfamiliar food. But it’s also perfectly possible for children to be picky without necessarily avoiding new food. Consider the child, for example, who might happily try something new (or is not exposed to new food items in the first place) but continually rejects familiar items like broccoli. Also, neophobia does not guarantee pickiness. When we are young, we are predisposed to a phase of not putting unfamiliar items into our mouths. This often happens when we become more mobile, and it could serve an evolutionary purpose, protecting us from potentially toxic substances in our environments.[19]
Some parents may confuse early neophobia with pickiness and mistakenly overcompensate by adding pressure to mealtimes. This can quickly backfire. Parental pressure and frustration are actually associated with an increased expression of food neophobia, because they negatively affect the child’s emotional state and, by association, make the child even more distrustful of the new food.[20]
Disgust is central to neophobia, but the neophobic child experiences disgust before they have tasted the new food. Indeed, “once the food is in the mouth, it is understood that the ‘phobia’ to the new food has been, in essence, overcome.”[20] Telling a neophobic child that the food tastes good might miss the point, because neophobia has more to do with visual and olfactory cues (sight and smell). This is why it helps when a child can observe others eating the same food in a happy, pressure-free environment: those conditions signal that the food is safe for consumption. Preferably, the child will observe more than one person eating the food at the same time.
It’s also helpful to set realistic goals. Although “[neophobia’s impact] is limited to the point where the child places the food in his/her mouth,” that feeling of disgust will likely remain until the child has been exposed to the new food several times.[20] Researchers often cite up to fifteen as the number of exposures that may be needed to overcome neophobia. Emphasizing positive associations during those first exposures goes a long way toward making sure the neophobia does not develop into chronic aversion, a hallmark of pickiness. To illustrate this point, more than half of the parents in a study reported that they thought their children were choosy at 15 months of age, but mothers who reported being worried about that choosiness were far likelier to have picky children at 3 years old than mothers who reported being not worried (17 percent versus 50 percent).[21] Worry in the parent might manifest negatively in several ways, including the counterproductive pressure mentioned above.[22]
Apart from not overreacting to natural neophobia, how else can parents minimize pickiness? Researchers have identified a few factors.[21] Later introduction of chewy foods (later is here defined as after nine months) is associated with greater difficulties in midchildhood. This suggests that complementary feeding, beginning after six months of exclusive breastfeeding, should include more than just purees. Another thing associated with pickiness is preparing meals for your children that are different from what you prepare for yourself. Remember the value of your child seeing you (and others too, ideally) eating the same types of food given to them. More fresh food, especially fruit, is also predictive of less pickiness.
What if your child is already picky? It is never too late to adopt new habits, and a few evidence-based strategies can help overcome picky eating. Studies show that activities that promote enjoyment in the kitchen translate to enjoyment in the dining room. Feeling that they are involved in the kitchen and that cooking is a fun activity directly increases the enjoyment your kids feel when eating. “The exposure to the taste of a wide variety of foods in childhood decreases picky eating,” write the authors of an article published in Appetite, “and experiential exposure to foods through cooking might have the same effect.”[23]
Finally, the sometimes subtle art of being a good role model can encourage your children to have a healthy relationship with food. Research has unsurprisingly shown that children’s eating patterns often resemble their parents.[24] As one study concludes, “These findings suggest that parents should focus less on ‘picky eating’ behavior and more on modeling fruit and vegetable consumption for their children.”[25]
Copyright 2025 Center for Nutrition Studies. All rights reserved.
