The little ones, when they find themselves in front of a plate of vegetables, if all goes well they turn up their noses, if it goes badly they refuse it by shaking their heads. This is the biggest stumbling block that most parents face at the table. And this is what investigates and explains the cover story “The child & the salad. How to make children eat vegetables”, which you will find in the new issue of Salute on newsstands Thursday 28 July with your newspaper.
The secret to convincing children
So what’s the secret to getting kids to eat more vegetables? She writes it, in his reportage, Giulia Masoero Regis: give them a prize every time they taste a morsel, increasing their willingness to test new products. The suggestion comes from an experiment conducted on nearly 600 asylum children by Dutch researchers from the University of Maastricht, who spoke at the European Congress on Obesity last May to provide new ideas on how to improve pediatric nutrition. But, despite the success of the experiment, according to psychologists and pediatricians, the behavior-reward mechanism is not the most suitable for the age of development.
Fresh and light: an outdoor snack for the little ones
by Giulia Masoero Regis
The Ismea investigation
According to an Ismea survey dated 2016, the latest on the subject, seven out of ten parents declare that their children consume fewer vegetables than they would like. Some blame it on flavor, others on too long times (which often don’t exist in the family) to prepare a good vegetable-based dish, others on the unattractive appearance of certain types of vegetables and on the pounding advertisements that push children especially towards snacks, snacks, sandwiches and ice cream. But apparently there is more.
The evolutionary reasons
Behind the aversion of the little ones towards vegetables there are not only whims and picky behaviors, but also evolutionary reasons. The book explains it Guide for hungry brains (The Assayer, 2021), remembering that our ancestors left us neophobia, that is a mechanism by which, in the first years of life, we doubt whether to ingest something we have never seen or eaten because we think it can be dangerous. Experts explain that children “have a predisposition towards red-colored foods and a sweet taste, and an aversion to green-colored and bitter-tasting foods.”
And they add: “Brussels sprouts, broccoli and artichokes are the vegetables tasted with more difficulty, because of their bitter taste, while carrots, courgettes, tomatoes, green beans and squash are among the favorites for their sweet or neutral flavor”.
Better zucchini and carrots
Pediatricians insist: “During weaning, the introduction of vegetables should take place starting from the sixth month of life, with at least two servings a day”. And they advise: “Better to start with zucchini, carrots and green beans, but there are no vegetables to avoid, because they are all sources, each in a different way, of essential micronutrients for the well-being of the child”. So what can be the strategy to use to entice the rebellious child to welcome vegetables on his plate with a smile?
Here’s how to do it
If rewarding, insisting or punishing are ineffective methods from an educational point of view, Rosanna Schiralli, psychologist and psychotherapist, creator and coordinator of European projects on emotional education, suggests cooking vegetables by imitating the shape of recipes loved by children and creating an active involvement. “So the carrots take the shape of chips, while the pressed spinach becomes hamburgers – he says -. When the children are older, you can go shopping and cook together, or ask for an opinion on the taste, stimulating the description of flavors. For fun, we can also associate the consumption of vegetables with the powers of the favorite characters of the children, as it was once done with Popeye, or create games at the moment of tasting “.
Vegetarian diet for children only under medical supervision. The risk is underweight
by Elena Bozzola
Insomnia is woman
But the new issue of Salute also offers insights into other topics, such as insomnia, which Elisa Manacorda declines to the feminine. Assuming that insomnia is not only the difficulty in falling asleep, but also that of staying asleep in a continuous and restful way, or having a sleep characterized by early awakenings more than three times a week for more than three months. And it is a disorder that women suffer from significantly more than men. “10% of the world population suffers from chronic insomnia, with a prevalence in women that increases with age until reaching a ratio of 1 to 3 after menopause,” he explained. Rosalia Silvestri, neurologist and head of the Sleep Medicine Center of the University of Messina. But when it comes to sleep, there are many differences between men and women: in the quality of sleep, in its duration, in its latency (i.e. the number of minutes it takes to fall asleep, which in women is longer).
Interview with the “media guru”
Finally, Salute interviews two important characters: the first, met by Gabriele Beccariais Frank Rose, who directs the seminar in Strategic Storytelling at Columbia University in New York and is a prolific anthropologist, writer and journalist. In short, he is a “media guru”: he explains to students, especially managers and entrepreneurs, that those who cannot tell the right stories at the right time are not going anywhere. Also a doctor with the patient and, conversely, the patient with the doctor. “People always react to other people”, reflects Rose, who presented her latest essay at the Turin Book Fair: The sea in which we swim (Editions Code).
Genetic heritage
The second interview, signed by Irma D’Ariais titled “The Man from Reykjavík” and is with Kari Stefánsson, Icelandic neurologist, founder and CEO of deCODE Gnenetics, based in Reykjavik, now belonging to the American biotech company Amgen Reykjavik. Stefánsson, at 73, leads the largest genetic laboratory in the world, the same one that has mapped the genome of 175,000 Icelanders (out of a population of 366,000 people) in the last 25 years.
After teaching neurology and neuroscience at Harvard University and directing the Neuropathology division of Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Stefánsson decided to return to his homeland and start his scientific adventure by founding the biopharmaceutical company based in Reykjavík which uses bioinformatics, statistics and artificial intelligence to plumb the secrets of the human genome, hunting for the links between genetic variants and the predisposition to the most common diseases, such as cardiovascular, type 2 diabetes and cancer. With the ultimate goal of developing innovative drugs for their treatment and prevention. He began by wanting to read the Icelanders’ DNA, and today he has the data of over 2.5 million people.