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Parents, eat your peas please

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Parents can teach their young children to favor healthful fruits and vegetables over high-sugar and high-fat foods, but you really have to walk the talk. In other words, eat the stuff yourself.

A study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis holds the proof. They assigned parents and their preschool-age children to one of two groups, one of which promoted eating fruits and vegetables at home through a variety of educational games and songs for kids, and handouts and cooking and shopping tips for parents. All of the parents were interviewed before and after the months-long study to determine their family’s fruit and vegetable intake.

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Parents in the educational program ate significantly more fruits and vegetables, and a change in the parent’s intake predicted a change in the children’s intake. An increase of one fruit or vegetable serving a day in a parent was associated with an increase of half a fruit or vegetable increase in his or her child. The study is published in the current issue of Preventive Medicine.

But here’s an interesting, and sober, finding from the study. This association only existed in normal-weight children. Overweight children in the educational group did not eat more of the healthful foods. ‘Overweight children have already been exposed to salty, sweet foods and learned to like them,’ says the study’s author Debra Haire-Joshu, a professor of social work. ‘To keep a child from becoming overweight, parents need to expose them to a variety of healthy foods and offer the foods many times.’

I wonder if this program works on teenagers. Seriously, if I had one thing to do over again when I was raising my kids, it would have been to introduce a much broader range of fruits and vegetables into their diets at much younger ages. And I would have eaten every Brussels sprout myself too. Really.

-- Shari Roan

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