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When my 2-year-old daughter began to prefer string cheese and croutons to peas and cauliflower, I got creative. First, I copied the artistic approach to vegetables I learned as a child. I started with the classic ant on a log and progressed to a cucumber caterpillar and a hummus monster with carrot teeth. My toddler was mildly amused. Then I reiterated how delicious bok choy was and how spinach would cheer her up. Most of the time, I was lucky if I could get a bite of anything green within an inch of her mouth.
So I turned to Instagram and TikTok, where I quickly discovered one veggie trick stood out above the rest: hide your kid’s least favorite veggies in their favorite dishes. Do they like pancakes? Mix in some powdered spinach. Macaroni and cheese? Maybe that distinctive orange color comes from carrots. You could even hide cauliflower or broccoli in pizza sauce.
Sneak smuggling tactics predate social media. Surprisingly delicious and Secret Chef: Simple strategies for hiding healthy foods in your child’s favorite mealsIt became a hot topic on TV shows and other media. The Oprah Winfrey Show And that today Stealth Cooking aired in the late 2000s. It’s amazing why stealth cooking has become so popular, considering how much work it requires. For example, making chicken nuggets with pureed beets from scratch takes an extra hour than buying a bag of regular chicken nuggets from the supermarket. But if it helps your toddler get the recommended cup or cup and a half of vegetables each day, isn’t it worth it?
The nutrition experts I spoke to said not so: “Kids generally don’t need to go to such lengths to eat their vegetables,” Laura Thomas, a nutritionist and director of the London Centre for Intuitive Eating, told me.
Of course, vegetables have many health benefits. Some studies have linked eating vegetables to a reduced risk of several chronic diseases, including heart disease. But those studies looked at vegetable intake over many years, not strictly what was eaten in early childhood. And even if many children in the U.S. don’t meet dietary guidelines for vegetables, Thomas says that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re nutritionally deficient. A large national survey published in 2018 found that young children, despite their notoriously dislike of vegetables, get enough calcium, vitamin A, and iron, on average. While young children tend to be deficient in potassium and fiber, kids (and adults, really) can absorb those important nutrients from meat, nuts, beans, whole grains, and other non-green foods. “There’s very little that’s unique to vegetables that you can’t get from other foods,” Thomas says.
Ignoring vegetables isn’t an ideal long-term solution, because many of the foods we tend to eat instead of them are higher in calories and lower in fiber. But in the short term, embracing substitutions can help your toddler get through his pickiest years without getting scurvy. And the point is, hiding vegetables among bread, meat, and sugary foods still means your child is eating a lot of bread, meat, and sugar. No matter how many vegetables you eat, you can’t counteract the harmful effects of excess sugar.
Leading nutritionists and child-development experts have been urging parents for years to stop pressuring or coaxing their kids to eat their veggies, but health-conscious parents just can’t seem to let go of the blender. That may not be down to picky kids, but rather the health messaging and fad diets their elders have been bombarded with for years. “Millennials grew up on ‘clean eating,’ and they still haven’t let go of that baggage,” Thomas says. Erin Sutter, an expert on healthy child feeding and parenting for decades, puts it more bluntly: “The belief is that if you hide vegetables in your kids’ meals, they’ll live longer and stay fat.”
According to Sutter and other nutritionists, chopping beets into meatballs or sneaking pureed veggies into kids’ mouths with whipped cream isn’t just pointless; the approach could even be counterproductive. “The goal of child nutrition is not to get kids to eat everything they should eat today, but to help them learn to enjoy a variety of healthy foods over their lifetimes,” Sutter told me. And everything scientists know about how to do that, as opposed to mashing vegetables indistinguishably and masking them with other flavors, is a big step forward.
Experts say that if you consistently prepare meals with your child that contain a variety of ingredients, including vegetables they dislike, without forcing them to taste or swallow them, they will eventually eat most of what is served to them. Sutter, who first outlined the approach in the 1980s, said it works primarily because it creates a bond of trust between parents and children. “Children need to trust their parents and let them decide what they will or won’t eat from what you offer them,” she said. If a child notices their parent hiding cauliflower in their tater tots or teaching them that little bits of broccoli are actually green sprinkles, that trust could be broken, and the child could become more wary of the foods their parents serve them or develop negative associations with vegetables, Sutter said.
Nearly 40 years after Dr. Sutter created his signature diet, pediatric nutritionists remain wary of the trust sneaking in of vegetables can erode. Yale public health professor Rafael Pérez Escamilla told me he would never recommend hiding vegetables among other foods, even if your child is in the midst of a mac and cheese obsession (as his son was for years in the ’90s). “Surround your child with healthy foods, but let them decide. Let them touch and smell food. Help them learn to eat when they’re hungry and stop when they know they’re full,” he said. “That’s easier said than done.”
While a hands-off approach is certainly less physically taxing, as Pérez Escamilla says, it can be a real emotional struggle. As a parent, I’m still tempted to add kale to my smoothies to soothe my anxiety, and I hesitate to repeatedly make creamed spinach for my toddler who just keeps rejecting it. But I’ve learned to find some solace in leading by example, rather than micromanaging.
Over the past few months, I’ve stopped mixing broccoli into pasta sauce and started serving it as part of dinner. My toddler would sometimes take a bite, sometimes not eat it. I’ve noticed that the less I show her I care, the more she’ll try things on her own.
