Children prefer vegetables that are crunchy with no brown patches, preferring also to choose what they eat beforehand, according to new research published by Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
'It's difficult to feed children with food which they dislike; rational considerations such as health hardly count at all,' concedes PhD student Gertrude Zeinstra, who carried out the research as part of an investigation into human nutrition and communication.
'I have searched for arguments which matter to children themselves,' she explained. 'Brown patches on vegetables are a real turn-off. Grown-ups might have learnt that such pieces of vegetables can add to the dish in terms of taste or mouth sensation.'
The way vegetables felt in the mouth was also important to children, she added: 'They appreciate crunchy vegetables more than slimy ones. That could be due to teeth and jaw muscles being in the developing stage and these have less control on what's in their mouth.'
A pioneering feature of Ms Zeinstra's research was the relation of food choice to cognitive development.
'Primary school children are often considered as a homogenous group, but they undergo major developments in this period,' she explained. 'Children aged four to six years view vegetables and fruits according to colour and shape. Their appreciation for vegetables is guided mainly by appearance and texture.'
She added: 'Children aged 11 and 12 however group vegetables only according to abstract qualities such as tastiness or the time of eating. For this group, taste is the deciding factor in their appreciation of vegetables.'
According to the research, other influencing factors include the prevailing mood at the dining table and the freedom of choice given by parents. 'It strikes me more and more that we in the Netherlands consume our vegetables at one moment, that is, during a hot meal,' noted Ms Zeinstra. 'Everything has to be eaten up then.'
Questionnaires used during the project revealed that parents often allowed their children to choose their fruit, whereas they were stricter when it came vegetables.
Ms Zeinstra wondered whether children would eat more vegetables if they had more choice. To answer this, she gathered 303 children, each accompanied by a parent, to the Netherlands' Restaurant of the Future.
Some of them were allowed to choose their vegetables beforehand, Ms Zeinstra explained.
'The children found it fantastic when they could choose. But that didn't have any effect on the amount of vegetables consumed. That came as a surprise to me because the mood was amiable,' she said.
For this reason, Ms Zeinstra felt that giving children the chance to choose would eventually lead to them eating more vegetables.
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