Kids Eat Vegetables with Cool Names

According to the latest finds, kids tend to avoid eating vegetables if they are referred to by means of simple terms, such as carrots, broccoli, cucumbers, and so on. Instead, scientists say, parents should learn how to give new, cool, and exciting names to veggies, so that children would eat them. Something like X-ray Vision Carrots should work just fine, they argue, and the facts are on their side: youngsters tend to eat twice as more veggies with cool names than they would otherwise.

For the new study, 186 children, all aged four, were given carrots in a number of days. In half of the time, they were told that they had been given carrots, with no additional “cool feature” to the veggie. Some of them ate the vegetables, some didn't, just like normal kids would do. On the other days, they were given veggies with super-cool names that the researchers concocted after a serious brainstorming. The results were pretty much obvious – kids consumed twice as many “cool” vegetables than they did “plain” ones.

“Cool names can make for cool foods. Whether it be 'power peas' or 'dinosaur broccoli trees,' giving a food a fun name makes kids think it will be more fun to eat. And it seems to keep working – even the next day,” the lead author of the new study, Cornell University investigator Brian Wansink, shares. The find was presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the School Nutrition Association, which was held in Washington, DC. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation offered the funds needed for the new study.

The researcher also pinpoints that not only children are predisposed to interpreting the taste of foods depending on their names. In a selected restaurant, a menu entry has been changed from “Seafood Filet” to “Succulent Italian Seafood Filet,” in a move that has increased the numbers of orders of the item by more than 26 percent almost overnight. Not only that, but tasting ranks also improved by 12 percent, even though the recipe itself remained unchanged.

“I've been using this with my kids. Whatever sparks their imagination seems to spark their appetite,” researcher Collin Payne, who has also been part of the new study, adds. And while the tests were conducted at pre-schools, the investigators seem fairly confident that the results also apply to children at home. So, parents may have just found a way of making their kids eat their veggies without having to resort to other means.