Last Update: March 10, 2023, 08:21 IST
Vegetable-themed e-books can help kids eat their greens. (Credits: AFP)
Research shows that when vegetables play a leading role in bedtime stories, babies may be less likely to turn their nose up at mealtimes.
Go ahead, Peppa Pig. The new stars of children’s books will be broccoli, eggplant, asparagus, spinach or oregano. Because when vegetables play a leading role in bedtime stories, babies may be less likely to turn up their noses at mealtimes, research suggests.
Watch out for a new gang of kids’ eBook heroes, who are taking the form of bell peppers, peas or cucumbers to help parents who want to foster their kids’ love of vegetables. See&Eat platform developed in collaboration with the FoodUnfolded portal, funded by the European Institute of Innovation and technology (EIT Food), makes available a range of eBooks through Hamari Kahani 2 app. To be viewed on a tablet, computer or smartphone, these books feature vegetables as stars. Like any children’s book, each vegetable is the star of its own story with its visual characteristics, its varieties, and its presentation of the way it was grown and harvested. The story is told right up to the plate, taking readers into the kitchen to describe how a bell pepper or a zucchini is peeled and cooked. With the help of a variety of photographs, the structure of each book is as straightforward as a regular bedtime story.
The purpose of this e-book series is to get young taste buds getting vegetables on their plates without getting annoyed or creating a fuss. And it works, according to the findings of British researchers. Food neophobia is a well-known phenomenon in young children, which has been widely described by neurobiologists. In fact, studies show that it may take between 8 and 10 presentations of a new food for a young child to finally accept it.
In the United Kingdom, many children eat less than the five recommended portions of vegetables a day, said the study, which evaluated the effect of visual familiarity with vegetables. The experiment consisted of viewing an eBook about a vegetable that the little guinea pigs had never tasted before, to evaluate its effect on the taste, intake and willingness to prefer the vegetable targeted by the eBook and a control vegetable. Over the course of two weeks, young readers learned all they could about a particular vegetable, which parents reported helped them more readily accept it on their plates. “Taste and intake ratings improved for the target vegetable, but not the control vegetable, whereas liking was reported to increase for both vegetables,” say the study authors.
Obesity among young French people is on the rise, according to a recent alert from Inserm, the country’s national institute of health and medical research. In this context, familiarity with foods as a means to better appreciate them is an essential issue that has been highlighted by various studies. In 2021, a study by the Association Sainte Environment France indicated that 87% of French children aged 8 to 12 had little knowledge of fruits and vegetables, not knowing how to recognize an artichoke, a zucchini or a beetroot. The analysis also revealed that 40% of school children did not even know where a burger patty came from, while only a third could correctly identify the composition of pasta. In the United States, a study published by Sapien Journal surprised young Americans between the ages of 4 and 7 by sharing their thoughts: for more than a third of them, bacon, hot dogs, burgers and cheese are plants. were made from!
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)
