Want Your Child to Eat Broccoli? Try a Dash of Sugar

BUFFALO, N.Y. - If a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, think what it would do for broccoli.

The senior George Bush went public with his dislike for this strong-tasting but good-for-you vegetable when he was president of the United States. But if his mother had known about flavor-flavor learning, he may have grown up loving it.

All it needed was a sprinkling of sugar, says Elizabeth D. Capaldi, Ph.D., University at Buffalo provost and professor of psychology, who studies the origins and development of taste preferences.

Her work has shown that one's palate is mostly a blank slate at birth: Babies are not born hating cooked carrots. This means that people can learn to like foods that are good for them and learn to dislike foods that are bad for them.

Flavor-flavor learning is a staple concept in her research. It involves linking a food that may be good nutritionally, but not particularly toothsome, with a taste that humans are genetically programmed to like, such as sweetness. The theory goes like this: Once the palate has learned to associate broccoli, for example, with "tastes good," and that taste pattern is set, the sweetness can be removed gradually and broccoli will be appreciated on its own merits.

The flavors must be mixed together initially to be effective, however. Using the promise of sweetness -- dessert -- as a reward for eating one's spinach is a very bad idea because it sends the wrong message, she says.

"What that does is teach the kid to dislike vegetables and to like dessert. It's completely reverse of what parents think they're doing," Capaldi says.

Capaldi admits parents aren't keen on dosing their children's fruits and vegetables with sugar, even temporarily, but she knows from experience that the method is effective. Capaldi has employed flavor-flavor learning to teach college students to like cauliflower and 5-year-olds to drink grapefruit juice, happily.

"It's a method that will actually work," she says. As further proof, she offers up the coffee drinker who gradually switches to black after years of taking sugar and cream.

Capaldi has edited two books on the psychology of eating and authored the chapters on taste preferences. A counterpart to flavor-flavor learning is taste aversion, which involves pairing a particular taste with an unpleasant experience. An example would be letting a child too fond of ice cream eat that beloved food until his tummy aches. Capaldi does not recommend this tactic, however.

Another approach is simple exposure: By eating the same food over and over, it can become familiar and appealing. She uses skim milk as an example: Most people find it watery when they start drinking it, but after a while they become accustomed to the taste and whole milk seems too rich. But that process can take two to four months.

"Most of us are not that patient." Capaldi notes.

Familiarity also can be tiresome, an effect that prompts most humans to seek variety in their diets, she says. It also is the characteristic that, in addition to an iron will, makes single-food diet plans work for some people.

"If I give you only bananas, how many bananas could you eat, no matter how hungry you are?" she asks. "If I give you bananas and bread, you could eat more. And if I give bananas and bread and chocolate, you could eat a whole lot more."

So when a diet says only eat 'x,' it really doesn't matter what 'x' is, she says. (Think the "cabbage-soup diet" or the "grapefruit diet.") "If you can only eat 'x,' you will get tired of it and you will eat less." This syndrome produces a simple equation: Eating less = fewer calories = weight loss.

The bottom line of Capaldi's research is that people are in charge when it comes to their taste preferences.

"Every time you eat, you're giving yourself a learning trial, training yourself to prefer something," Capaldi says. "You can teach yourself better eating habits. It just takes a lot longer than you might be willing to wait."