Eat Your Greens by Jane Bartlett

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Lettuce, leeks, beans, cabbage, broccoli, sprouts…you name it, they won’t touch it. Jane Bartlett on how to help young fusspots who hate healthy vegetables

'A few weeks ago my four-year-old son wouldn’t eat potatoes, no way. Jackets, mashed and roasted were greeted with high decibel howls, followed by angry demands for pasta. Unless they were chipped, nothing would tempt him to try this innocuous food. Then something incredible happened. We went for lunch with another family, who have two children of a similar age. Jacket potatoes were served. My son looked doubtful.

‘Try them,’ I urged. ‘These are very special ‘children’s potatoes’.’ He watched his peers around the table tucking into their spuds with glee, then suddenly, he gobbled up the lot, skin and all. Now ‘children’s potatoes’ are one of his favourite meals.

We need to pay another visit so that he can encounter mashed and roast potatoes too, and I am looking out for other children who might be able to work their magic with green leafy veg. Inadvertently, I have discovered one of the great secrets of children and healthy eating: peer pressure. Children copy each other’s eating habits, and there’s actually the science to back up this theory. According to Professor Fergus Lowe, a psychologist at the University of Wales in Bangor, who for the past nine years has been exploring ways to get children to eat more healthily, ‘peer pressure is very powerful’.

A conversion can be achieved

Professor Lowe has discovered that fussy eaters can be transformed into fruit and veg chomping champs, if they are just given a little encouragement. He shows them a short ‘Food Dude’ video starring animated characters and child actors. The ‘Food Dudes’ are fruit and veg munching heroes who fight the baddie ‘Junk Food Junta’ and make the world a better place.

Next, Professor Lowe gives the children little rewards, such as Food Dude stickers and hats, for eating up their greens. ‘It works extremely well,’ he says. ‘The reason why kids don’t eat fruit and vegetables is, to a large extent, down to peer pressure and advertising, which creates a culture that’s very negative about fruit and veg. We aim to change the culture, so that it becomes a trendy thing to do, then you get all that peer pressure on your side,’ he says.