‘Through adult modelling and guidance, they will learn how to look after their bodies, including healthy eating.’
If you’ve ever wondered why your preschooler came home asking whether or not such-and-such food was ‘healthy’, this might be why. This is the mandate from the statutory framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage - a diktat that oversees early years (0-5 years) providers in England. The requirement specifies that by the age of 5, ‘[children will have an] understanding [of] the importance of healthy food choices.’ Beyond this though, there isn’t any guidance on how to actually teach a nebulous concept like health. Nor is there any discussion of how it might have the exact opposite effect than desired.
Nationally representative surveys show that only around 1 in 5 children in England aged between 5 and 15 years old meet the recommended 5 portions of fruit or vegetables a day. And, on average, only 8% of children over 2 years old reach the recommendations for fibre. And while I am firmly in the camp that nutrition doesn’t need to be perfect for kids’ wellbeing, even I concede this is a problem.
But we are kidding ourselves if we think the solution is to teach kids how to sort foods into ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ foods. Let’s first take a look at the assertion that just teaching kids that a food is healthy will change their behaviour.
Eating is driven by internal motivation; taste, pleasure, sensory preferences, the satisfaction of a full belly, the joy of sharing a meal. That’s pretty much it. Dangling the ‘carrot’ of health, a vague and distant concept for most adults, let alone a seven year old, functions to increase their external motivation; the external reward value of eating.
Researchers have found that when we try to increase external motivation by using health hype, it sends that message that a food is ‘instrumental’; it serves a function. That means it competes with the food’s ability to taste good.
In one series of studies, scientists told preschool kids a story about a little kid who ate some Wheat Thins crackers before they went out to play. Half of the kids were told the crackers were ‘healthy’ and made the kid in the story strong. The other half didn’t receive this message, just a story about a kid playing. And guess what? The kids who were given the message that the crackers were ‘healthy' actually ate less of them after hearing the story compared to the control group. After the experiment, the kids were invited to take home either a box of Wheat Thins or a box of Ritz crackers - the kids who were told the Wheat Thins were healthy were more likely to pick the Ritz to take home, whereas the kids in the control group were split 50/50 Wheat Thins or Ritz.
The researchers concluded that not only did telling kids that food was healthy stop them from eating the food in the moment, it signalled that they were less likely to want to eat it in the future.
There are a few different reasons why.
Going back to the proverbial carrot, if we are telling kids that there is an external reward for eating something - be it a claim about ‘health’, getting a bowl of ice cream for eating their peas, or a gold star on a sticker chart - we are inadvertently signalling that the food is hard work because we need a reward for eating it. It’s the food equivalent of telling them they can only play video games once they’ve done the annoying/boring/difficult thing. They just want the video games more, and learn to resent tidying their room. Not only are we saying that eating this food is a chore and we need an incentive to get through it, on the flip side we are elevating the status of so-called ‘unhealthy’ foods and unwittingly creating food hierarchies. ‘Unhealthy’ foods don’t need to be incentivised so they must inherently taste good.
And when adults are simultaneously losing their shit about ‘unhealthy’ food (see: “oooh I’m being so bad for eating this”, “you can’t have dessert until you’ve finished your main”, “that will rot your teeth”) kids learn that these foods are a BFD*. That there’s something uniquely enticing and special about them - something known as the ‘forbidden fruit effect’. This only serves to increase their appeal, creating a one-two punch of why the healthy/unhealthy binary leads us farther away from our stated goal.
Another issue is that, inevitably, a child will be given ‘unhealthy’ food. Probably by a loved and trusted adult. Ice cream at the seaside with Grandma. Birthday cake at a friend's party. Pizza night on the couch. This causes what psychologists call cognitive dissonance (cw; lots of ob*sity chat). To kids, it’s a complete head fuck. What we are asking kids to do is hold in mind two disparate things that are really difficult for them to reconcile.
‘This person who I love and who loves me is giving me something they have told me is unsafe for my body’
It’s a lot for little minds to process, so to deal with this conflict, kids tend to push down or drown out one of the competing messages. That means they might focus on the ‘pizza is bad’ message and forget that most people like and enjoy pizza! Especially if those kids are anxious, perfectionist, or neurodivergent and who want to follow the rules to the letter.
But even for kids who have a pretty laid back disposition, it can lead to feelings of guilt or shame when eating these foods, or sneaking them to eat in secret. After all, ‘healthy’/’unhealthy’ is just an iteration of ‘good’/’bad’ - and if kids are eating so-called bad foods, what does it say about them when they eat those foods (bearing in mind that kids are pretty concrete thinkers well into secondary school). Even if a kid has reasonably free access to these ‘unhealthy’ foods (i.e. they’re not overtly restricted), hearing these black and white messages can lead to a scarcity mindset that causes them to override and lose trust in their internal cues. We see this all the time with dieters who force themselves to restrict foods they love and enjoy - it almost always ends in the ‘fuck-it effect’. ‘Fuck it, I’ve had one now, might as well eat the whole thing’ - which is an entirely reasonable reaction to feeling deprived and hungry.
The healthy/unhealthy binary is also problematic because, of course, ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ foods do not exist. Food and nutrition are contextual. Some neurodivergent children who have sensory processing differences might only be able to eat foods that are deemed ‘unhealthy’ - yet they are a primary source of nutrition for those kids. And like I discussed recently, only eating ‘healthy’ foods can cause a range of issues around growth, development, and physical wellbeing.
All foods provide nutrition - sure the relative amounts of vitamins, minerals and macronutrients will vary. But nutrition is only one of the reasons we eat food. (And ice cream has more nutrition than rice cakes. I dare you to fight me on this).
