Vegetables may not have to 'hide'

PASS the peas please! How often do we hear our children say this? According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behaviour Surveillance System survey of adolescents, only 21% of our children eat the recommended 5 or more fruits and vegetables per day. So not very many children are asking their parents to "pass the peas," and parents are resorting to other methods to get their children to eat their vegetables.

One popular method is hiding vegetables. There are even cookbooks devoted to this practice and some new food products even promise they contain vegetable servings but don't taste like vegetables. This ''sneaky'' technique has been controversial, and some dieticians, doctors, and parents have argued that sneaking vegetables into food does not promote increased vegetable consumption because children are unaware they are eating vegetables, and are not likely to continue the practice into adulthood.

A study in the March/April 2012 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behaviour found that informing children of the presence of vegetables hidden within snack food may or may not alter taste preference. Acceptability of the vegetable-enriched snack food may depend on the frequency of prior exposure to the vegetable.

Chickpea, anyone?

Chickpea chocolate chip cookies or chocolate chip cookies? Investigators from Columbia University enrolled 68 elementary and middle school children, and asked just that question. In each pair, one sample's label included the food's vegetable (e.g., broccoli gingerbread spice cake), and one sample's label did not (e.g., gingerbread spice cake).

Participants reported whether the samples tasted the same, or whether they preferred one sample. What the children didn't know was that both samples contained the nutritious vegetable.

Taste preferences did not differ for the labelled versus the unlabelled sample of zucchini chocolate chip bread or broccoli gingerbread spice cake, the investigators found. When it came to the chickpea-labelled chocolate chip cookies, however, students preferred the unlabelled cookies, i.e., chocolate chip cookies.

The investigators also assessed the frequency of consumption for the three vegetables involved and chickpeas were consumed less frequently (81 per cent had not tried in past year) as compared to zucchini and broccoli.

Neophobia

Lizzy Pope, MS, RD, the principal investigator of this study states, "The present findings are somewhat unanticipated in that we were expecting students to prefer all three of the ‘unlabeled' samples."
 
These findings are consistent with previous literature on neophobia, or the tendency to like anything new, which suggests that children are less apt to like food with which they are unfamiliar, Ms Pope also said. Since the majority of students had had broccoli and zucchini within the past year (as compared to chickpeas), it appears that there must be some familiarity with a vegetable for the labelling of the vegetable content not to influence taste preference. Considering this then, it is not surprising that the unlabelled version of the chickpea chocolate chip cookies was preferred over the labelled version."

 Based on what the investigators learned from this study, it seems more important to introduce our children to a variety of vegetables rather than continually hidingNike