How to Get Kids to Eat More Vegetables

Anyone with a picky eater knows the challenge of trying to get them to eat vegetables. They may not…

Anyone with a picky eater knows the challenge of trying to get them to eat vegetables. They may not like the taste, smell, or texture, or may even think they don't like a vegetable without even trying it. We try to coax them into trying just a little, trick them by cutting veggies into fun shapes, dip them in dressings, or threaten to withhold dessert. The problem is these approaches often don't work. A new Stanford University study suggests an answer that's much less stressful. Simply teach your kids about nutrition.

What the Findings Show

For the study, children were broken into two groups. One was taught about nutrition and the other was not. Talking with children, even very young children, about the benefits of eating vegetables was found to make a difference in eating habits. Kids who understood why eating a variety of foods is healthy ate more vegetables by choice rather than under compulsion. After 3 months of intervention, those who had been taught about the "why" behind nutrition actually doubled their voluntary intake of vegetables during snack time.

The amount of vegetables eaten by the second group stayed about the same. Researchers explain it this way. "Children have natural curiosity -- they want to understand why and how things work. Of course we need to simplify materials for young children, but oversimplification robs children of the opportunity to learn and advance their thinking."

Nutrition Storybooks Used

To simplify the nutritional information, researchers Sarah Gripshover and Ellen Markman created 5 storybooks. These books were strategically designed to revise what kids know or think about a number of nutrition-related themes. The books covered topics like dietary variety, digestion, food groups, and nutrients.

The study involved more than 160 four and five year old children. Researchers assigned some preschool classrooms to read the books during snack time for 3 months, while the other classes enjoyed their usual snack time. Later, when the children were asked questions related to nutrition, the kids who had heard the nutrition storybooks better understood that food has nutrients and why they were important. According to researchers, these children also had a better understanding of the digestive process like how the stomach breaks food down and how nutrients are carried throughout the body by the blood.

More Research Needed

The Teaching Young Children a Theory of Nutrition: Conceptual Change and the Potential for Increased Vegetable Consumption study was first published on June 26, 2013 in Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science. While the findings of this Stanford University study suggests that teaching kids about nutrition increases their willingness to eat more vegetables, further research is needed to establish whether or not such intervention makes a difference in healthy eating habits outside of snack time and whether or not the changes are sustained over the long-term. A separate study also shows that kids who eat more vegetables actually do better in school.