Sublime

The loss of hunger regulation after the age of four is a phenomenon that transcends cultures and continents.

The third—which I’ll call “kid food”—says that children should be fed exactly what they like, no matter how sugary or fake.

“Kid food” is based on the presumption that children have a natural palate for simple carbohydrates, fat, sugar, and not much else.

its composition matters not just in the short term but because it forms how the children will eat in adult life.

isn’t true, though, to say that “feeding disorders” are only for infants, and “eating disorders” are for teenagers and adults. To study disorders of eating is to see that we live in an era when some children are old before their time, and some adults are forever juvenile.

Another successful strategy is combining a scary new food with a familiar old one.

Perhaps there are still traces of the nursery food mentality around. In some families, the injunction to avoid salt in a child’s diet for the first year spills over into a generalized avoidance of flavor, as if a ten-month-old couldn’t handle the pungency of garlic or paprika. To dine with the parents of toddlers may entail a meal of boiled broccol

Up until the age of three, children have a remarkable ability to stop eating when they are full. It doesn’t matter if you serve them a big portion or a small portion; they will eat until they are not hungry and then stop (assuming they are not force-fed). After that age, this ability to self-regulate hunger is partially lost, and sometimes never re