Chatting about food habits with your children may encourage them to eat healthy says a study. This may help them develop better and run faster. The study was published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behaviour. The findings revealed that affirming statements were more effective at getting kids to make healthy food choices than serving them same kind of food repeatedly without any conversation.
Kids ate twice as much healthy food when they were told how it would benefit them as opposed to when they were given the food without contextual information about how beneficial it is to them.
"Every child wants to be bigger, faster, able to jump higher," said study lead author Jane Lanigan, Associate Professor at Washington State University in the US.
"Using these types of examples made the food more attractive to eat," Lanigan said.
Through the study, the researchers wanted to examine if child-centred nutrition phrases (CCNPs), affirmative statements that simply convey the benefits of healthy food, influenced young children to eat healthy or tend towards healthy food.
The team picked 87 children and ran an experiment where they offered healthy foods to a group of 3-to-5-year-old children for six weeks.
"We found that a month later, the kids ate twice as much of their CCNP food with the repeated exposure compared to the food without the positive words. For example, when we presented lentils we would say, 'This will help you grow bigger and run faster'," said Lanigan.
(With inputs IANS)