Children are notoriously picky eaters, but a Texas State study suggests teaching healthy eating at an early age could keep moms from pestering kids to eat their peas.
The Best Foods for Families, Infants and Toddlers program, or Best Foods F.I.T., will encourage San Marcos restaurants to serve nutritional meals on their kid’s menus and teach parents of small children to cook healthy meals for their families.
BJ Friedman, family and consumer sciences professor, said local eatery Grin’s Restaurant has signed on to participate in Best Foods F.I.T. Her goal is to have 50 restaurants commit to offering healthier options for kids. The Institutional Review Board must give the program permission to continue before she seeks more participants.
Friedman said finding simple ways to make healthy dishes without putting too much strain on the restaurants is key. The healthy options should include fruits and vegetables with little salt and fat, she said.
“We’re not sure what the restaurants will be willing to do, but we’re going to try to work with them and make it as easy for them as we can to get this going,” Friedman said.
Sylvia Crixell, family and consumer sciences professor, was part of a team that did the initial research that sparked the idea for Best Foods F.I.T. The team interviewed San Marcos mothers with children aged four months to two years about what they feed their children.
The results were disappointing, but not so different from national trends, Crixell said.
Only one child of the 98 interviewed had recently eaten a dark green vegetable, she said. The majority of the children ate potatoes and corn more than any other vegetables, foods that are not nutritionally dense.
“If foods like French fries are among the first foods introduced, the most important foods in their diet, then it becomes difficult to convince them when they’re older to eat foods like spinach if they don’t have any experience with it,” Crixell said.
Feeding children fruits and veggies from the start is crucial because they develop their taste pallet and food preferences early on, Crixell said.
“It’s an important area of intervention to make sure the infants start out with better diets,” Crixell said. “We expect that it will affect them the rest of their lives. It may go on to affect health, body weight and everything else.”
Participating restaurants will be indicated with a decal of the Best Foods F.I.T. logo, Friedman said. Newsletters and a Facebook page will help spread the word about the program, she said.
Students majoring in nutrition and foods will have the opportunity to work on the program by contacting restaurants, gathering and analyzing data and instructing cooking classes intended to teach mothers to cook healthily on a budget.
“They’ll be the workhorses helping us implement this program,” Freidman said. “It will give those students an incredible opportunity to be involved in research that really has a strong impact on the community.”
Crixell said Best Foods F.I.T. will be advantageous to parents because it will give them the chance to make healthy choices for their children even when they are not cooking themselves – education is nothing without opportunity.
“Now, most restaurants cater to our norm of French fries, chicken fingers and things like that. If they (parents) get education about healthy foods, and those foods are readily available, they’ll be more likely to choose them,” Crixell said.
