Young toddlers who eat a range of fruits and vegetables may learn to enjoy healthy eating as they grow older, an Australian study suggests.
Researchers found that 14-month-old babies who regularly ate fruits and vegetables were more likely to eat them and less likely to be fussy eaters when they were nearly four years old.
“The take-home message for parents is pretty simple: introduce your toddler to a range of healthy foods early . . . this means offering your child a variety of different fruits and vegetables,” said lead author Kimberley Mallan, a researcher at the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.
Food preferences are developed as early as the first two years of life, Mallan and colleagues write in Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. But up to a third of children do not eat fruits and vegetables in their first three years and most eat unhealthy snack foods, according to past research.
The researchers compared the dietary habits of 174 children whose mothers received nutrition counselling to 165 who did not. All were part of a larger Australian study of mothers and children from Brisbane and Adelaide, starting in 2008 and 2009.
Dietitians and psychologists counselled the mothers in six 1.5- to 2-hour interactive group sessions every two weeks. Data on babies were collected at birth, age four months and age 14 months, with follow-up at two years and three to four years of age.
Researchers used various scales and questionnaires to measure the number of fruits and vegetables and “non-core foods” the children tried weekly at each age. Non-core foods are not in the “core” food groups like milk, which babies and young kids should consume every day, according to nutrition guidelines. They include cookies, candy, salty snacks and other less-healthy foods.
Both groups of mothers had about the same number of fussy kids at age 14 months.
The babies who tried a greater number of fruits and vegetables liked these foods more at three to four years of age than those who did not eat the items when they were younger. Eating a greater number of non-core foods as an infant was also associated with liking those snacks more as a three to four year old.
Parents also need to adopt the same healthy eating they expect of their kids and find ways to make meals enjoyable, said Field, who was not involved in the study.
