| Magazine Feature |

Focus on the Finicky

By Faigy Schonfeld | March 1, 2017

No more food fights! Tips, tricks, and insider secrets on how to feed your picky eater without feuds

I s mealtime in your home a recipe for frustration? A guide for understanding your picky eaters — and getting ’em fed!

Why So Fussy?

Eating habits are generally shaped by a mixture of environment and experience. But sometimes physical neurological and psychological factors play a role as well.

Give Cravings the Cold Shoulder

If you’re an expectant or nursing mom you’ve probably heard about the importance of healthy food choices and the impact on your baby. But here’s another reason to ditch the chocolate: A fetus tastes the flavors of its mother’s food via amniotic fluid and newborns through their mother’s milk. This experience says research may very well affect their future food choices. Repeated exposure to specific flavors may influence their eventual food preferences making familiar tastes more palatable. So bring on the broccoli!

Bitter Blues

With their smaller physical size children have a naturally lower tolerance for bitter or sour tastes. Kids who are sensitive to these flavors usually display a greater penchant for sugary foods and drinks (though adults who won’t touch a grapefruit don’t typically have the same sweet tooth). If that sounds like your kid take heart: experiments show that bitter or sour flavors may grow on them when combined with sweet foods.
Note: Kids with bitter-sour intolerance were rated “more emotional” by their moms only when the mother displayed bitter-insensitive tendencies. Hmmm....

Caution: Genes at Play

If your son is roundly rejecting dish one two and three try to remember that he’s probably not trying to be difficult. In most cases of picky eaters the “blame” actually goes to the parents with studies showing that genes are a significant influence in kids’ eating tendencies. When the specific genes governing taste are extra-sensitive taste buds are in a perpetual state of high alert and report strong signals to the brain transforming what you would consider simply a disliked food into a horrific experience for a taste-sensitive kid. When it comes to sweet-tooth cravings it’s the same genes at work too.

Excerpted from Mishpacha Magazine. To view full version, SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE or LOG IN.

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