Category Archives: Picky eating

Why prenatal kale is not the answer

A few weeks ago, a study made its way into my mailbox, my socials, and my mind. It was about the link between prenatal exposure to specific flavors and facial expressions at age three. The study did not measure the amounts of veggies eaten – it was just about smell. Basically, they measured facial expressions,…

The myth of letting go

When a parent asks other parents how to get their child to eat more vegetables or more solids, there’s a wave of advice flooding in. ‘Relax, she’ll grow out of it.’ ‘Just let it go and wait until it passes, it’s just another phase.’ ‘Make Pinterest-proof monsters out of fruit.’ ‘Tell how broccoli are little…

When diets are projected in Plato’s Insta-cave

A few weeks ago, my private Instagram led me to a reel titled ‘What my toddler eats in a day’. Unlike those ‘my kid eats broccoli like a champion’ videos – that are falsely suggesting that eating broccoli is one of the highest achievements in parenting – this video promoted a high-protein, low-carb, and moderately…

De-pathologizing picky eating

‘I hope my child won’t be a picky eater.’ I hear this so often from parents, and every time I recognize both the worry and the hope behind those words. The tricky part of ‘picky’ is that picky eating lacks a clear definition. Researchers, blogs, and parents all describe picky eating differently: some say it’s…

‘I was a picky feeder’

There I was, nearly 3 years ago, helping my toddler in our hotel bathroom, telling him that it might be harder to poo because he ate too many of those cookies at the buffet. What I said wasn’t exactly true, because our transit is more complex than my one-liner. The truth was … I could…