Make Your Kids Like Veggies Through Flavour-pairing: Study

To make your child like vegetables, get down to flavour-pairing by using sauces, dips and dressings for vegetables, says a study. Parents have always been trying different tactics to make children eat vegetables, but the new study, published in Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, said food pairing will be a step ahead in making children not only eat but also like vegetables.

“This has the potential to change the eating habits of children, including eating more vegetables, and this in turn will affect childhood obesity,” Elizabeth Capaldi-Phillips, a psychologist at Arizona State University and lead author of the study, told Reuters.

Authors of the study said the trick of combining an all new food item with something a person already likes could go a long way in encouraging children to eat more fruits and vegetables.

Researchers picked up 29 children aged 3-5 years and found out about the vegetables which they don’t like or hadn’t eaten before. They found that children had not tried cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. So for seven days a group of these children was given plain vegetables, while the other group was served the vegetables with cream cheese and sweetened cream cheese. And they found that the second group liked the vegetables more than the one which ate the veggies plain. These children also happened to eat vegetables even later and had gradually started liking them.

Researchers said this method can be applied to other vegetables as well and this way kids can be made to eat vegetables and fruits because flavour-pairing helps them develop a liking for such vegetables and fruits.

Source-Medindia