Picky Eating Isn't the Food's Fault: Fix the Relationship First, Then Talk Nutrition
The feeding strategy itself matters less than how you execute it; a parent tending to their own relationship with food is the most effective intervention a child can get.
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The feeding anxiety starts at the nine-month checkup
Jennifer is a registered dietitian who did nontraditional work in the USDA's SNAP education program and figured she knew how to feed a kid. At the nine-month checkup the doctor said her child's weight wasn't keeping up, and she says that moment felt like the rug being pulled out. For years after, she worked to keep her kids on their growth curves, and her second son showed early signs of extreme picky eating. Standing in the kitchen making lunch, she realized she couldn't be the only parent struggling this hard, so in 2019 she started Kids Eat in Color, posting feeding tips as a hobby at first.
— Jennifer AndersonThe research behind "don't pressure your kid" isn't that strong
She says "don't force your kid to eat" is a great slogan, and for some families that one line is enough. But after digging into the research on feeding pressure, she concluded it isn't as strong as dietitians and feeding experts make it out to be, and parents actually have more room to experiment. The second part of her book is devoted to "what if the standard advice doesn't work": first the general recommendation, then the alternatives that are considered less ideal but can be executed with reduced risk, which she calls risk reduction.
— Jennifer AndersonPut a small piece of green pepper on the plate five hundred times
The exposure method she teaches parents: put one small slice of green pepper on a plate full of foods the kid likes. The goal isn't to get him to eat it, but to desensitize him to its presence. Maybe after five hundred times he'll sniff it, then lick it, then throw it at his brother, then one day eat it. The precondition is that the kid is regulated — if he isn't soothed, he simply can't try something new, because he's scared of something else. So get the kid calm before he even sits down at the table.
— Jennifer AndersonAn anxious kid has a dry mouth and a tight throat and physically can't eat
Sarah adds the neural mechanism: when anxious, the mouth goes dry, the throat tightens, there may be nausea or stomach pain — exactly the signs of sympathetic (fight or flight) activation, while eating requires the parasympathetic rest and digest state. In other words, if every time you come to the table it's dread and a power struggle, you're physiologically pushing the kid in the opposite direction from eating. Play, jokes, little table games work because they bring the kid into that relaxed, connected parasympathetic state, and only then do saliva and swallowing come back.
— Sarah BrenA meal can be rescued from the worst possible start
She tells of one dinner at her house: before the parents even got back to the table, the two kids were already fighting and one slammed the door to his room. They let that kid cool off in his room and the other three started eating. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the kid came downstairs and started eating, the whole family was laughing, everyone was eating. She says the meal ended with the siblings fighting again, but the moment of connection in the middle was real. So don't hold yourself to perfectionism — there's usually at least one good moment in a meal; find it.
— Jennifer AndersonSensational headlines you can basically swipe right past
The first filter she gives parents: if the headline is sensational, you can be almost certain it's wrong, probably ninety percent of it is taken out of context, so keep scrolling and don't lose sleep over it. But if it's a real event — say an outbreak of diarrhea one summer, a specific food recall — then pay attention. What she really wants to give is a tiered framework: the first tier is severe food allergies and insufficient calorie intake (ARFID, extreme picky eating, food insecurity), which can make a kid very sick or worse, and must be dealt with first.
— Jennifer AndersonProtein and fiber sit in tiers two and three, food dyes in tier four
Tier two is protein: every meal and most snacks should have a real protein food. Tier three is fiber, because fiber trickles down — when a kid eats enough high-fiber food, he naturally eats less of the added sugar and added sodium stuff. And food dyes, the thing that grabs headlines most easily, sit in tier four, with a very narrow impact. She says for the vast majority of kids, artificial dyes won't change their health trajectory; for the small number who are sensitive, parents have probably already figured it out on their own. Taking dyes out of the food system wouldn't solve the childhood health crisis either.
— Jennifer AndersonCall it a "cookie," not an "occasional food"
To help parents who don't have a healthy relationship with food, her entry point is "talk about food with facts": call foods by their names — this is a cookie, this is a sandwich, this is your chicken, this is your sugar. Don't say "this is an occasional food, this is an everyday food," don't sort your kid's food into healthy/unhealthy or good/bad, and avoid moralizing and black-and-white thinking. She says there's no evidence that black-and-white thinking directly causes eating disorders, but research has found it's very common in kids with restrictive eating disorders, and hearing "foods are good or bad" gets embedded in their restrictive thinking.
— Jennifer AndersonYour own relationship with food is the most effective intervention
She believes that parents working on their own relationship with food is often the single most effective thing they can do to help their kid build one. You can model the correction out loud: "I used to call these foods good or bad, but I changed my mind, I can just call them by their names, and if you catch me saying good or bad, remind me." Kids love catching their parents' mistakes. Sarah adds that her mother said in her forties that one of the best things about being a person is that you can change your mind, and hearing that in her twenties has stayed with her to this day.
— Jennifer AndersonIn their own words · checked verbatim
And so our goal then is to reduce that risk. And I call it risk reduction.
Jennifer Anderson14:15
And so often the strategies matter less than how you do them.
Jennifer Anderson14:15
if your kid isn't regulated they're not going to be able to branch out. They're not going to be able to taste the pepper because they're freaked out about who even knows what
Jennifer Anderson17:19
The opposite of fight or flight is rest digest.
Sarah Bren25:24
And so often what makes for the best headline starts around tier four where we are talking about food dyes.
Jennifer Anderson34:30
it's not going to solve the child health crisis that we're seeing
Jennifer Anderson36:31
Kids are not that easy to ruin.
Jennifer Anderson41:33
often us taking care of our own relationship with food is going to be the most effective thing for helping our kids with their relationship with food.
Jennifer Anderson52:42
Figures
| Year Jennifer started Kids Eat in Color | 2019 | 6:06 |
| Age in months when the pediatrician said her child's weight wasn't keeping up | 9 months | 5:05 |
| Share of sensational headlines she considers inaccurate | about 90% | 32:28 |
| Calories in three bites of cheese | 100 calories | 21:21 |
Glossary
- ARFID / avoidant restrictive food intake disorder
- An eating disorder in which a child takes in too few calories because of avoidance; it belongs to the first tier of problems.
- rest and digest
- The parasympathetic-dominant state in which the body is willing to eat, produce saliva, and swallow.
- hyper palatable food
- Processed food loaded with sugar, sodium, and the like that keeps you eating and unable to stop.
- health impact tiers
- A tiered framework ranked by how wide or narrow a factor's impact on a child's health is; the earlier the tier, the higher the priority.
How to listen
Parents of preschoolers and school-age kids getting pummeled by picky eating, food dyes, and protein anxiety, plus nutritionists and pediatric practitioners who do childhood feeding counseling.
30:27 to 31:28 is a sponsor read; skip it.