FOUR CHILD Eating Habits

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31936, 13 March 1969, Page 3

FOUR CHILD Eating Habits

(By NEIL THOMAS) Does your child eat itoo many sweets and too few vegetables? Or not enough of anything? If you worry about such things, take heart from an experiment made by a woman doctor in 1939. She had a variety of dishes I placed in front of a group of babies for each meal. The ; dishes held all types of foods. 1 Some were natural favourites, such as bananas. Some were I foods which children reject. For several days the babies were allowed to choose what I they wanted to eat They | determined their own diets. Most of them went on “jags” for several meals, eating only their favourite foods. Some ate only bananas for days at a time. They paid little attention to adult standards of what goes with what or in what order foods should be eaten. Some started with desserts and worked back to appetisers, for example. Did the babies choose poor diets for themselves? Did they miss out on their proteins or eat too many starches? Not at all. The babies all ate the proper proportions of the right foods. Balanced Diets They balanced their diets with correct amounts of vitamins, minerals, proteins, starches, and fats. A dietician could hardly have planned their diets better. Some of the babies even ate salt straight, grimacing all the

while. They seemed to know they needed salt. Their diets were not perfect every day, but over several days they balanced correctly. This experiment shows that children will look after themselves. Certainly, you must provide the proper diet; but you should not worry when your child eats no vegetables for two days. Doctors notice that people suffering from Addison’s disease automatically eat more salt. The disease interferes with the salt system in these persons’ bodies. Their bodies seem to tell them to compensate by eating more salt. Plaster Eaters Children who eat plaster from the walls are sometimes found to have a calcium deficiency. Plaster, of course, is rich in calcium. Children traditionally hate spinach. They do not know that spinach has an acid which disrupts the calcium system in some bodies and therefore is not always an appropriate food for very young children.

These cases indicate you should not worry about your child’s food fads.

You may want him to eat spinach for a social reason—so that he will always be polite or never waste valuable food. But if you insist that he eats spinach or beans or potatoes for a nutritional reason, there is probably no cause for the insistence.