“All kids are picky eaters.” Or so says the food industry.

But is it true? 

Babies and children learn to like the foods their parents eat. If you eat a whole-foods, nutrient-dense diet and feed your baby those foods, she will like them too. It’s that simple. Avoid “baby-foods” and “kid-food” and your baby will grow to be a child and adult who loves real food. 

Where Did That “Picky Eater” Come From?

Researcher Bettina Cornwell at the University of Oregon has shown that the key to healthy eating habits is repeated exposure. “Children can learn to like healthy food, just the same as they can learn to like junk food,” she said. This is why she does not buy the idea of the “picky child eater” who will eat only a limited number of foods. “There are real and true clinical instances of neophobia [the irrational fear of anything new]—but this does not describe the majority of children and majority of the resistance to nutritious, healthy foods,” she said. 

“You have parents who say, ‘My child only eats peanut butter and jelly; my child only eats chicken nuggets’ . . . and then they say, ‘My child is a picky eater’ because the child now won’t accept steamed Brussels sprouts. But has the child had adequate exposure to those foods? That is the question.”

In another major study, researchers found that a child’s junk food diet, as opposed to a traditional or health-conscious diet, was positively associated with being a difficult eater. This suggests that exposure to junk food actually creates the picky eater, not the other way around, as many American parents commonly believe. The researchers write, “The results do allow an interpretation that junk food in the diet may change attitudes toward other foods.”

It is also why food marketing orients much of its advertising to the youngest children; like researchers, marketers know that teaching young children to like fast food and packaged foods early on will influence their lifelong dietary choices. 

“You can imagine that going to McDonald’s, three or four times, six or eight times, twelve or eighteen times, starts to set a pattern where those foods become accepted,” Cornwell said. 

Marketers Promote Bad Habits Effectively

In one fascinating study, Cornwell and a colleague looked at the toys that accompany fast-food meals for children, specifically toys that were part of a set. When food manufacturers create toys that are part of a set, it encourages children to nag their parents to return to the restaurant to complete the set, thereby ensuring that the child is getting repeated exposure to these foods. 

“Very young children are cognizant of set completion,” Cornwell said. “And they hold set completion goals— so this toy, for example, is part of a set of three, so you have a fast-food meal with one toy, and you become aware that the other two toys exist, and then you want to return to get the second in the set of three, the third in the set of three—it is this concept of repeated exposure.”

The toys that are part of a set with fast-food meals become powerful influencers, even of how the food tastes. In her study, Cornwell found that when the third toy in the set was presented as part of the healthy meal, the children found that the meal tasted better.

This makes the marketing of children’s food particularly troubling. While it is widely accepted that the marketing of junk foods encourages kids to eat more of those foods, leading to obesity, diabetes, and even heart disease in children—not something to take lightly—there is something even more insidious at work if these foods are creating various feedback loops that result in children wanting to eat more of these same foods, become desensitized to particular flavors and components in whole foods, and significantly alter their taste preferences. 

Likewise, the marketing of infant formula is especially worrisome because of its profound implications for long-term health. We now know that what a baby is fed from day one will have consequences for his lifelong food preferences and long- term health.

Many babies are getting processed foods in the womb and then, with the introduction of infant formula, as their first food at birth. Then babies and children are immersed in a processed food culture that has completely normalized the nutrient-poor foods they are expected to accept and like. Those bland white foods made from refined and processed grains, added sugar, and poor-quality fats in the form of vegetable oils—products like bread, pasta, crackers, and cereals—industrial foods that deprive children of nutrients critical to their mental and physical development. 

Newborn babies and young children are the most vulnerable among us, and the food industry is capitalizing on that by pushing formula on new mothers and later luring young children to eat its foods with ploys like the promise of a toy set. 

The innate wisdom that has been honed over millennia by cuing us into what foods will keep us optimally healthy is being sabotaged by an industry solely focused on profits. Big Food is setting us up for lifelong health problems and a lower quality of life—and in the case of young people today, the most dire ramifications are coming to fruition: they will have an even shorter life span than their parents.

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For more on this see my book, Formerly Known As Food, chapter 4.