A strategy for children to eat more fruit, proven by a study carried out with more than 200 children, suggests place stickers of children's characters on the fruit so that children accept them better.
It is neither more nor less than a way to dissuade them that the apple with the face of Elmo or Mickey Mouse stamped on its lustrous skin is tastier than another that does not have it, as if they were to bite it and the taste was different. A nonsense. Do you think that these types of measures are effective?
When a child is offered a good variety of fruits since he begins to introduce complementary feeding, always respecting his age of introduction, he is opening a world of flavors that will be tasting, savoring, experimenting with different textures and sensations.
It is very likely that a fruit that he loved stops appealing to him for a while and then returns to it without problem, as if he tried it for the first time. These "potholes" are normal in tastes. The important thing is to offer a variety of flavors for them to experiment, rather than disguise the fruit with photos of princesses or Dora the Explorer.
According to the study, if children were offered cookies or apples with their lunch, the children tended to choose the fruit if the label included a sticker of a cartoon character, in this case Elmo, from “Sesame Street”.
Including the Elmo decal made the children choose the fruit more, while the cookies chose them interchangeably whether there was a decal or not (logically, for cookies they don't need extra motivation, most children like them). Sometimes, both cookies and fruit were offered without drawing stickers. Those days, 91% of the children chose the cookie.
It may work for some children, I do not say no, it is logical that they call more attention to the foods that "include" their favorite characters, but It is not the way to awaken your taste for fruits, or for food, in general. An apple has to like it because of the sensation of eating it, its texture, its flavor, not because it has a sticker attached. And what will happen when you don't have a sticker, won't you eat it?
Anyway, I think certain techniques like place stickers of children's characters on fruits so that children accept them better they make no sense, they are ephemeral solutions that establish a superficial relationship with food. The child's relationship with food is established since they are very young, so the key is to offer variety, presented in a fun way, without camouflaging them, so that they themselves can choose.
Via | Vitónica
Photo | Muffet on Flickr
In Babies and more | Fruits in infant feeding
