First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

What matters most for determining whether your tastes will be healthy ones is not whether you have a sprout-hating gene, but how your genetic predispositions interact with your food environment.

Eating well is a skill. We learn it. Or not. It’s something we can work on at any age.

the key to improving diet is not pushing people to do something they are resistant to doing, but removing the barriers to change. These barriers could be psychological, cultural, or economic, or they may have something to do with the environment in which we live.

market researcher who worked with an average of 4,000 children every year found that their single greatest wish was for “control.”

The way you teach a child to eat well is through example, enthusiasm, and patient exposure to good food.

If our food habits are learned, they can also be relearned.

In contrast to all the other things we work on in life that are far less likely to increase our well-being—including dieting—it is astonishing how little effort we put into changing our eating preferences for the better. There is every indication that the basic methods of eating better—increasing variety, including more plant foods, structuring mea

You have to relinquish, or at least cut down on, the joy of indulgence—the bliss of seeing a small creature gobble up treats like Pac-Man. You also have to give up the illusion of power or the feeling that the child’s stomach is just an extension of your own—the belief that you can make a child stop or start eating because you know best.

Very few of us allow ourselves—or our children—to experience the sensation of hunger at all these days. We are semi-sated much of the time, preloaded with nibbles here and there that hardly seem to register as eating.