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When my two year old started favoring string cheese and croutons over peas and cauliflower, I tried to get creative. First, I emulated the artistic approach to vegetables I remembered from childhood, starting with the classic ants on a log and then progressing to cucumber caterpillars and hummus monsters with carrot teeth. My toddler was only slightly amused. Then I turned to persuasion, repeating how delicious bok choy is and how strong spinach would make it. Most days, I was lucky to get one bite of something green within an inch of her mouth.
So I turned to Instagram and TikTok, where I quickly noticed that one veggie trick was winning over all others: Hide the vegetables your child doesn’t like in the dishes they love. Does your child like pancakes? Mix a little powdered spinach into those. Mac and cheese? That distinctive orange color could come from carrots. Even cauliflower and broccoli can be hidden in pizza sauce.
The sneak-it-in strategy predates social media. Authors of parenting cookbooks, for example Deceptively Delicious and The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in the Best Meals for Kidsmade the rounds on TV shows like The Oprah Winfrey show and the Today show back in the late aughts. It’s amazing how popular stealth cooking is when you consider the amount of work involved. You might spend an extra hour cooking, say, chicken nuggets from scratch with pureed beetroot stuffed inside – rather than buying a bag of regular chicken nuggets from the supermarket. But if it helps your toddler get a cup or a cup and a half of vegetables every day, it’s worth it, right?
The nutrition experts I spoke to say no. “Most babies don’t need us to go to such great lengths to get vegetables into them,” Laura Thomas, a nutritionist who runs the London Center for Intuitive Eating, told me.
Vegetables, of course, have many health benefits. Several studies have linked eating vegetables to a reduced risk of several chronic diseases, including heart disease. But these studies look at veggie consumption over many years, not strictly at what you eat as a toddler. And while many children in the United States aren’t meeting the dietary guidelines for vegetables, Thomas said that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re malnourished. A large national study published in 2018 found that, despite their reputation for hating vegetables, young children on average consume enough calcium, vitamin A and iron. They tend to be low in potassium and fiber, but children (and adults, for that matter) can absorb such vital nutrients from meat, nuts, beans, whole grains, and other non-green foods. “There’s almost nothing inherent to a vegetable that you can’t find in other foods,” Thomas said.
Ignoring vegetables is not an ideal long-term solution, as many of the foods we eat are high in calories and low in fiber. But in the short term, embracing alternatives can help your toddler live in their best stages without getting scurvy. And most importantly, if veggies are hidden in bread or meat or sugar-heavy foods, it means your kid is eating a lot of bread or meat or sugar. No amount of vegetables can counteract the harmful effects of too much sugar.
Prominent nutritionists and child development specialists alike have been telling parents for years to stop pressuring and tempting children to eat vegetables. But health-conscious parents don’t seem to put the blender down – which may say less about picky kids and more about the years of health messages and diets their ancestors endured. “All these Millennials who grew up with ‘clean eating’ didn’t really deal with that baggage,” Thomas said. Ellyn Satter, who has been an expert on nutrition and raising healthy children for many years, says it: “The belief is that if you include vegetables in your child’s food, they will not get fat and they will live forever. .”
It’s not just worth secretly shredding beets into meatballs and shoving pureed vegetables into our kids’ mouths with whipped cream chasers, say Satter and other nutritionists. The approach can even be counterproductive. “The goal of child nutrition is not for children to eat everything they are supposed to today. It’s to help them learn to enjoy a variety of healthy food for life,” Satter told me. And scientists have everything they know about how to do that as opposed to grinding vegetables into an unrecognizable pulp and covering them with other flavors.
Experts told me that if you consistently prepare and eat meals with your children that include a variety of foods – including vegetables they don’t like – without forcing them to taste or swallow anything, they will eventually learn how to eat most of what is available. Satter first outlined this approach back in the 1980s, and told me that it works mainly because it creates trust between parent and child. “The child has to trust their parents to let them decide what the parents eat or not,” she said. If your child finds out that you hid cauliflower in their toddlers or you tell them that tiny pieces of broccoli are actually green sprouts, Satter said, you could shatter that trust, and your child could become more be careful of the foods you serve or develop. negative associations with vegetables.
Nearly 40 years after Satter described her method of feeding, pediatric nutritionists continue to be wary of the confidence-destroying potential of vegetables. Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, a professor of public health at Yale, told me that even if your child is going through a mac-and-cheese phase (as his son did for many years in the ’90s), he would never recommend hiding vegetables. in other foods. “Surround your child with healthy foods, but let the child decide. Let the kid touch the food, smell the food; let the child learn to eat when he or she is hungry and stop eating when he or she knows he or she is full,” he said. “Easier said than done, but it works.”
The hands-on approach certainly takes less physical work, but Pérez-Escamilla is right that it can be a real emotional struggle. As a parent, I’m still tempted to ease my anxiety by sneaking kale into a smoothie, and hesitate to cook creamed spinach for my toddler time and time again but refuse it every time. But I’ve learned to get comfortable acting as a role model instead of a micromanager.
In the last few months, I’ve stopped slipping broccoli into pasta sauce and started offering it as part of dinner. Sometimes my toddler takes a nibble; sometimes she doesn’t. I have noticed that the less I show that I care, the more she will experiment with herself.
