Young children tend to be picky with what foods they will eat, as their taste buds and digestion differ from adults. It can often take a lot of coaxing to get a child to eat a new food. Less common, though maybe as torturous, is getting an adult picky eater to consume healthy foods he doesn't like. In some ways, it is even more important for older adults, in particular, to get their nutrients from healthy foods. There are several ways to approach tricking a picky eater into eating a more nutritious diet.
Change Texture
One of the reasons why some adults tend to be picky eaters is because they don't like the texture of certain foods. Raw or cooked vegetables, seaweed and even seeds can have hard or slimy textures that turn certain people off. The way to deal with texture is to change the form and offer it a different way. For example, in her book "Savvy Eating for the Whole Family: Whole Foods, Whole Family, Whole Life," Margaret McCullers Kocsis recommends making broccoli into a smooth-textured creamy soup or shredding salad into uniform bits.
Change Look
Another approach to dealing with picky adult eaters who don't like health food is to change the look of vegetables or beans. Kocsis offers the example of sprinkling offending foods with cheese or dipping them in dressing or ketchup. Peanut or almond butters can also make a raw vegetable look more enticing. Even cooking certain foods in a sweet coconut curry sauce, such as sprouts or carrots, makes them look and taste very different compared with when they are raw.
Make Small Changes
As much as with trying to get children to eat new foods, making small, barely-noticeable changes with meals for adults might do the trick. Sandra Nissenberg notes in her book, "Quick Meal Solutions: More Than 150 New, Easy, Tasty and Nutritious Recipes," that using a different bread in a sandwich -- for example, whole grain instead of white -- is one way to get more nutritious foods in the diet. Other examples include substituting white rice with quinoa, a highly nutritious grain that is lighter than brown rice, or mixed lettuce in place of iceberg lettuce on sandwiches and in salads.
Repetition
Similar to getting children to like a new food, repetition is necessary to get an adult to like foods outside of her normal menu. Tastes must be developed and acquired over time, so foods need to show up on a plate 10 to 20 times before the taste buds have adapted to them. As Nissenberg notes, food preferences change over time, so repeating new foods gives them a chance to become a normal part of the diet.
References
- "Savvy Eating for the Whole Family: Whole Foods, Whole Family, Whole Life"; Margaret McCullers Kocsis; 2006
- "Quick Meal Solutions: More Than 150 New, Easy, Tasty and Nutritious Recipes"; Sandra Nissenberg; 2007
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