Children won’t eat veg? Try growing your own

IF you have trouble persuading your children to eat their greens, give them a trowel and send them out into the garden.

Researchers found that children who learn to grow vegetables are more likely to eat their five a day.

In fact, they are five times more likely to enjoy salad when they have grown it themselves.

A team from Ohio State University and Cornell University in New York monitored 370 students eating lunch in their school canteen over three days to see what they put on their plate and what they left behind.

On normal days, just 2 per cent of students added salad to their main meal. But when the salad ingredients were grown by pupils in a school project, 10 per cent chose the healthy option.

Lead author Dr Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, said: ‘This is a small study, but it suggests gardens can help children’s diets.’

Researcher Drew Hanks added: ‘We see great promise with this research. The first hurdle in increasing vegetable consumption is simply getting kids to put them on their plate.’

The findings, published in the health journal Acta Paediatrica, add to a growing body of research that suggests dietary habits can be fundamentally altered early in life. In a study last year, Leeds University scientists found that feeding vegetables to children before the age of two makes them more likely to develop a taste for greens.

The researchers also found that babies and toddlers are more ready to accept new vegetables than older children.

And it is possible to teach even fussy eaters to like a vegetable, by feeding it to them five to ten times in small quantities.

Professor Marion Hetherington, who led the British research last year, said the findings offered valuable guidance to parents.

‘If you want to encourage your children to eat vegetables, start early and often,’ she added.