Kids really do avoid food that’s good for them

Children are often fussy eaters, and most parents would say that trying to convince them that a given food is good for them won't help convince them to eat it. As it turns out, "won't help" might be overstating things. When told that a food serves some purpose other than tasting good, kids will rate it as less tasty and eat less of it.

Two Chicago-area researchers, Michal Maimaran and Ayelet Fishbach, phrase their research in terms of what they call "food instrumentality"—the idea that a given type of food is good for achieving a goal. Carrots are good for your vision, spinach makes you strong, and so on. The researchers suspect that this idea interacts with a quirk in the reasoning of young children: they tend to think of things as only serving a single purpose. If carrots are good for your vision, the reasoning goes, they're not likely to be good for your tastebuds at the same time.

Over a series of experiments with children three to five years old, the authors tested foods that were given various purposes: makes you strong, helps you read, or helps you count. In each case, the same foods were offered to a set of control children without any message. By a variety of measures, a positive message about the food undermined the cause: the children rated it as less tasty, planned on consuming less, and actually did consume less when they were given the chance to eat it.