Nutrition

Three factors affecting children's acceptance of new foods and/or their food preferences:

i) Genetics with parental influence: Children are born with a natural predisposition to like certain foods such as sweet flavored foods and dislike foods that have unpleasing taste like bitter or sour. In addition children also tend to reject new foods. However, with the constant offer of new foods it is likely to increase the likelihood of children accepting those new foods.

The early years of a child is an important part because of the control parents have over their children in feeding foods of their choices. They also are responsible for using the type of feeding practices, for example to breast feed or formula feed the child. There is one example from the article that shows the relationship between the feeding practice and accepting new foods by children. Mothers were trained to repeatedly feed their children with a new food. The successes of children accepting the new food were higher among those children that were breast fed than those on formula products.

ii) Society: Children place themselves under much scrutiny as they begin comparing themselves with celebrities. Eating is a social event where children express themselves or see it as a way to attain a certain body type. Children are repeatedly exposed to advertisements and media which promote thin body. The desire to achieve such type of bodies leads them to imitate those with thin body type. This in turn leads to the types of food choices young children (beginning as early as 8-11 years old) make.

Availability: The result of the studies showed that children who were restricted the of foods enhanced preferences of food. They ate more even in the absence of hunger.

The two ways that age group appropriate CFGHE reflects in this article are

i) Choosing diets that are moderate in sugar and low in fats and salts and

ii) Eating foods that are good ie, consuming foods such as fruits, vegetable and complex carbohydrate.

The role of a care giver is to provide infants with foods that shape the early food environments by influencing the types of food they offer or restrain, the timing, the amount of food and the social context of eating occasions. They also act as models for children's eating. They are also responsible for choosing strategies that are designed to regulate the amount of food children eat and also informing children of the healthy and unhealthy foods.

A summary of number of servings of the 4 food groups

Day 1

Grain products

Fruits & vegetables Milk products Meat & alternatives