Some kids are happy to snack on carrots, raw peppers and hummus, while other kids would be happy to follow a carb-based “white” diet of pasta, rice and bread.
Why are some kids so fussy about food? It turns out that your child will turn up his nose at mealtimes for a dizzying number of reasons. A 2015 study of hundreds of studies dating back to the 1990s that looked at the eating behaviors of children showed that fussy, picky or choosy eating preferences were correlated with and influenced by everything from personality characteristics to mealtime parental control to social factors to patterns of maternal eating. Or it may be just that your kid was, well a kid.
According to Lee Gibson, PhD, a reader in biopsychology and director of the Clinical and Health Psychology Research Centre at Roehampton University in London, a significant thing to note is that fussy or picky eating is common in young children. And in general, it appears to be detrimental to overreact or attempt to apply rigid dietary regimes to discourage picky eating.
'Parental anxiety is not going to help,' says Gibson. "When offering food, it is better to learn by example, always be positive and show kids how much you like a meal when you ask them to eat it."
And while the evidence of long-term health effects of eating after childhood into adulthood is quite scarce, the evidence that exists suggests that picky eating habits do not seem to be correlated with an elevated risk of being overweight or obese (that is, at population level, looking at patterns of how picky eating affects most children), according to a review of several previous studies.
However, pediatrician Tanya Altmann, MD, adds that if a picky eater does not get enough good nutrition due to being too selective, picky eating (especially severe picky eating) can lead to short- and long-term nutrient deficiencies and other problems in individual cases.
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