Eating Veg Daily as Babies Helps Children to Accept it Later on

18 Jun 2015 --- A new study has discovered that giving babies vegetables on multiple occasions can help children learn to like them. As part of the study, one month after weaning, children were then fed unfamiliar vegetable (artichoke) and fruit (peach) purées in a taste test, and a researcher recorded how much of it they ate and how much they appeared to enjoy these foods.

In the UK, children ate almost twice as much of the unfamiliar vegetable compared with control children whose parents were not advised to offer vegetables as first foods. UK mothers and researchers also rated the children as liking the vegetable more.

In Portugal and Greece there was no significant effect of the intervention on infants’ intake of or liking for the vegetable.

Researchers said this is likely to be because common first foods given to UK children include fruits and ‘baby rice’, while vegetables, particularly green or bitter tasting varieties, are offered less frequently.

In contrast, vegetables are regularly offered as first foods in Portugal where vegetable soups are a common weaning food. This is reflected in later dietary patterns as Portuguese schoolchildren have some of the highest levels of vegetable intake in Europe.

“The findings of this study suggest that repeatedly offering a variety of vegetables to infants at the start of weaning may work to increase vegetable acceptance in countries where vegetables are not already given as first foods,” said researcher Alison Fildes.

“However, we don’t know yet whether this effect will last throughout toddlerhood and into later childhood, so this will need to be explored in future studies.”