First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

Yet despite their anxiety about candy, parents will happily feed their children highly sweetened sports bars, fruit snacks, and cereals that are candy in all but name.

those who are eating are free to develop their own tastes, because all of the choices on the table are real, whole food.

As the name suggests, neophobia isn’t just a dislike of how something tastes; it is an active fear of tasting it. In many cases, neophobia can be broken down simply by feeding the food to the child numerous times—often as many as fifteen—until the child realizes she hasn’t suffered any adverse consequences. See, the tomato didn’t kill you! See, it

The third—which I’ll call “kid food”—says that children should be fed exactly what they like, no matter how sugary or fake.

Some parents use food as a pacifier, to keep the little ones quiet. Some withhold treats for bad behavior. Others fret about foods that are too rich or too strange for tiny stomachs, and pass on a generalized anxiety about eating. Trends in food change from decade to decade, yet our default patterns of eating are largely a response to an older gene

The first—which I’ll call “family food”—is that, past the milk drinking of babyhood, children’s food is no different from any other food: everyone in the house, adults or children, grabs what they can get from the common pot. This teaches children to eat fast and seize their chances when food is available.

This is one reason that weight gain is so hard to reverse—particularly when it is caused by binge eating: the obese have increased gastric capacity, meaning that it takes longer for the stomach to feel full. And if the stomach doesn’t feel full, the brain can’t feel full either.

If our food habits are learned, they can also be relearned.

Modern children have so many forms of sweetness offered to them that, in my experience, a common reaction to a candy cane at Christmas is not joy, but mild resentment that the sugar rush is tainted by the minty flavor of toothpaste.