A big shout out to ABC Radio NSW for being a Stand for Children's Health. Each week, I will be chatting to Patrick on air about food, family and children's health.
We've got loads of great topics we'll be covering. Most weeks, I will be on air live with Patrick on Tuesdays at 10.40am. However, some weeks I may be on a different day if I'm running school incursions.
Here is this week's recording.
picky eaters
Andrew:
Food. Now Belinda Smith is the founder of The Root Cause and we catch up with Belinda on a regular basis and she goes through her little segment and I find myself sitting here going I need to put the nose bag on.
Belinda, good morning to you.
Belinda:
Good morning Andrew and listeners. I hope you're all having a wonderful day.
Andrew:
Well yeah, off to a flyer so far. Now the topic you're talking about today is picky eaters. Now I can guarantee you I'm not a picky eater. If I kept a diary of what I ate over the course of a week, I'd probably be consigned to some ward somewhere. So what do you refer to as picky eaters?
Belinda:
Well look, the reason why I've got this topic today is because we partner with schools right around Australia and we help parents. We provide them with an online support haven called the Food Friendship Café and they complete a little entry survey to identify what they're struggling with. And 83% of parents have said that they need more ideas because their children are fussy eaters.
So, and this is something that I have seen growing as an issue over the last 10 years that I've been working with schools and supporting families. And it tends to just be fussy eating falls into that thing where parents try to feed their children's food and their children will turn their nose up at it or they'll say, I don't like it or it causes grief at the dinner table one way or another and it's probably one of those things that at three o'clock in the morning when, usually mums I do say, wake up in the morning worried about a whole range of things that
they start to worry about their children's health and long-term health because they're not eating a wide variety.
So, picky eating can look at like many different things to many different people but the term is really just thrown about when people are struggling to get their children to eat usually vegetables and fruits.
Andrew:
And look that's been part of households probably for hundreds of years hasn't it that if mom and dad and you've got the three or four kids you're not going to satisfy everybody in one hit are you?
Belinda:
Well no but that's actually a perfect segway into a part of what I wanted to talk about today and it's a little bit of an uncomfortable conversation that I want to have today which you know here at The Root Cause we've been standing for Children's Health for 10 years and what that often means is sometimes having to have conversations that are uncomfortable but obviously not with any judgment attached to it.
So the first thing I want to start with today is to say to all parents and caregivers out there you are doing an amazing job. We are living in a very complicated world with raising children now between food and technology and school life and we're still coming off the back of a pandemic like a parenting era that no one else has ever confronted
before and I just want to say that you're doing an amazing job. So we're all doing the best that we can with the knowledge that you have
available to at the time.
So I'm hoping today that I can have that uncomfortable conversation that might just get you to have a bit of a think about what's going on if you feel like you have a fussy or a picky eater, of course.
So I want to start by just saying something that is obvious, but we don't think about it often enough for it to be top of mind. The foods that we have from nature, like our vegetables and our fruits and our legumes and even like our eggs and our milk and all of these things, these fresh foods from nature tend to be inconsistent. And what I mean by that is a carrot that you have that comes in a bag that you might get from the supermarket, each of those carrots can look different and taste different, even though they're a carrot. But if you compare that to a bag of chips or a muesli bar, like the level of processing that comes from the foods that are made in factory brings a long consistency.
So for a child, when they're confronted with a food that is from the factory, like any of our ultra processed foods that end up in our lunch boxes, for instance, chips, muesli bars, crackers, cookies, all of those things. They're all consistent. So children know exactly what to expect from the moment they open that bag, but they don't know exactly what to expect
when they get their vegetables and fruits.
So quite often, if we've already got a child that is slightly anxious, that level of variability that comes with food from our farm can induce a little bit of anxiety straight away. So I wanted to let parents in on that little perspective that sometimes it's like nutrition starts before eating. It really starts with getting our children familiar with the fact that vegetables and fruit will taste different depending upon even where they're from or what season they're from and even like growing it from your garden compared to the growers markets compared to the supermarkets
for instance. So just having that little bit of an understanding of the difference, does that make sense?
Andrew:
It certainly does, yes. And look, sometimes it's great to have these conversations and use the term Belinda, put it on the table, isn't it?
Belinda:
Very good term.
But you know, I think the other thing is to understand that the foods that are from the factory as well as them being consistent. What the scientific research is now actually showing is that they've been formulated in such a way that gets our brains to respond and light up with excitement because of the flavours, the combination of the salt, the fats, the sugars, the additives, the flavours and colours. They are scientifically designed to elicit a response that gets our brains excited.
So as parents we’re actually up against it because you know, while ever that's going on our children have this expectation that food should light up our brains all the time and so that again is another reason that makes our job more difficult.
So the bits of the conversation that I wanted to have today that are a little bit uncomfortable is the first thing that we need to ask ourselves as parents or caregivers is “Are our children really fussy or do we have a really high expectation of what we would like them to eat?” And what I mean by that is, you know, if I turn back the clock 10 or 15, you know, 10 years ago, a fussy eater tended to be termed to be a child who was having issues with texture or gagging or their smell would just turn them away from food. But now in the busy world that we live in, when we've got home from work and we've cooked dinner and we just expect everybody to be on the same page at exactly the same time and our children aren't eating, all of a sudden we've, you know, this children not being ready to eat what we want to eat at the time we want to eat has become the term fussy. So I always encourage parents to think about - are we setting the bar too high for ourselves? Are we expecting that everyone will show up to the dinner table and eat everything without any dramas every night? Like what's the expectation that we're setting for ourselves?
So that's the first thing and it can be a little bit tricky for us to take that step back and just consider like are we expecting too much?
The second thing is - Are they really fussy or is it that they need additional support? You know, like when I say additional support, it means just us letting go a little bit of that high expectation and being prepared to, you know, like maybe put food out in the middle of the table and allow our children to try a wide variety from the middle but not expect them to eat everything. And this is actually a classic technique to encourage children to eat more. But I had a mum say to me, I just wish my daughter would eat more salad. And I said, well, you know, how often is she eating salad? And she said, oh, well, I don't put it out because she won't eat it. And so, you know, that there's this thing that I always like to say, if they can't see it, they can't eat it. So if we're not putting it out for them. And then we're saying they're fussy. Our children start to think they're fussy, but we're not giving them the opportunity to actually get out of that and become familiar with the food and try the food.
So a great technique is to serve a wider variety of food in the middle of the table, like some you know that they'll eat and some that you think they might not eat, but just allow them to see it and have the opportunity to try it. And anything they don't eat, please don't think it's wasted because us parents often don't do a great job at feeding ourselves for our lunch the next day. Package it up and pop it in your lunchbox for yourself for the next day but consistently turn up and expose your children to those wide variety of foods and give them the opportunity to try them without doing things like just lick it or one bite to be polite like those things are kind of in a way can pressure our kids.
So just being open to allowing them to try it.
Andrew:
Picky eaters. I remember as a kid growing up there's four or five of us sitting around the kitchen table as kids and mum and dad would put the
meal out and if you didn't eat it they'd say you go hungry. That's it, see you later.
Belinda:
Yes, I grew up in a house similar and in fact you know like even if we didn't eat it we weren't allowed to leave the table until we did eat it. So things are very different. We now know like all of the latest information about how to ensure that our children don't end up with food anxieties. It's about providing food in a non-pressurised environment and giving them the opportunity to try things and not labelling them.
What I'm about to say is an uncomfortable conversation and it's taken a lot of years to build up the confidence to say this to parents. But I would love for you to think about when we attach a label to our child like they're a fussy eater. It's like putting them in a box and closing the lid on them and that becoming who that child is and then they hear you talking about little Mary's a fussy eater and so little Mary starts to think, oh I'm a fussy eater and it's a little label that she starts to associate with herself. She even starts to think of herself as a fussy
eater. And whenever we've got them in that box, we're not allowing the opportunity for them to, you know, like jump out of that box and try something else. And it's a bit like if you're in the school playground and someone says to you, oh, you smell like poo or you, you know, they call you carrot top because you've got a red hair or something and they get called a name.
We're inadvertently doing that to our children without realizing it. There's no harm or malice involved in it but that's like a little name calling that our child takes on about themselves.
So what I would love for people to take away from today's call is if you find yourself saying those things that my child's a fussy eater, I would encourage you to think about yourself. You know, what food didn't you like when you were growing up that perhaps you may like today or are there even foods that you don't like today? And does that make you a fussy eater? So maybe what we should be saying instead of saying our child's a fussy eater we could say something that's quite empowering, which is my child, you know, like little Mary has strong preferences at the moment, but we're working on expanding what she eats. It allows little Mary to grow into you know eating a wider variety and it takes the stress off us as well.
So I would love every parent who's struggling with that to take that on today.
Andrew:
Picky eaters. All right.
Belinda always interesting catching up with you on a Tuesday and we'll do likewise again next week. Thank you.
Belinda:
My pleasure. Take care of everyone.
Andrew:
Belinda Smith. Picky eaters.