Healthy Food & Healthy Living by Dr. Ayala

Pleasure can help us eat better: 3 tips for feeding kids

Newborn babies derive pleasure from sweet, energy-dense food – this instinct serves us humans well and guarantees babies will get enough calories to grow and thrive. Healthy newborns are also great at self-regulation and don’t overdrink their milk.

The ability to self regulate, however, diminishes with age, and kids are disposed to overeating pleasurable, sweet and fatty foods. The fun and pleasure of tempting foods overrides weak and progressively weakening satiety signals.

The message then becomes: Resist pleasurable food; avoid temptation.

Alas, telling people, especially kids, to eat for health and nutrition doesn’t seem to work all that well. In the US, where parents and educators emphasize nutrients and health, and where food is a source of worry rather than of pleasure, obesity and diseases related to poor nutrition are much more prevalent than in France, where food pleasure is emphasized from childhood.

Can we shape healthy eating habits by learning to derive more pleasure from good food? A new review in the journal Appetite tracks efforts to do just that. Not surprisingly, the article, led by Sandrine Monnery-Patris comes from the Bourgogne Franche-Comté University in France, a nation that finds many remedies and solutions in the pleasures of life.

The authors find that three dimensions of food joy influence kids' tastes and habits.   

1. Kids enjoy what they know

Review of the literature shows that exposure of newborns, babies and kids to new tastes increased their acceptance and pleasure from that food. This starts in the womb – moms with varied diet have infants that like more foods. Breastfed babies are exposed to a greater variety of flavors and may enjoy more foods as a result.

Exposure in childhood remains the best predictor of what kids will like: Babies repeatedly exposed to veggies, to different textures of food, come to accept and want to eat these foods. It might take 10 times, but often, to know a flavor is to love it.

We need no prior knowledge when it comes sweet food. For other tastes, it takes tasting and re-tasting in many kinds of preparations.

2. Kids enjoy what their family and peers enjoy

When young people hear the “mmm” of food pleasure, when they see facial expressions and vocalization of others enjoying food, they are more likely to enjoy that food, too.

That’s why kids, even babies, should eat in company. Kids are more likely to eat a food when they see an adult eating it, and even more likely to eat it when other kids eat and enjoy it.

That’s why family meals are critical.

And why eating in front of screen is the worst.

What we do as parents is much more important than what we say. Telling your kids to drink water when you’re always walking around with a diet soda in your hand is as effective as telling them not to drive distracted when you’re often on the phone while in the driver’s seat. Eating healthy foods and enjoying these foods models good habits in our children.

3. Kids enjoy what they expect to enjoy

Omnipresent ads for junk food drive the message that these foods give great pleasure. Kids – especially kids in the US – associate unhealthy food with fun and tastiness; and healthy food with bad or not-great taste.

That’s because good-for-you-foods usually emphasize how they’d help us achieve health goals and meet nutritional needs. They appeal to our knowledge and cognition, not to our emotions, desires and imagination.

This review suggests that it’s time to change that.

Give healthy foods attractive names, pretty presentations and tell kids they are tasty and pleasurable and the positive expectation will be fulfilled.

Pleasure can help us eat better

It’s easy to do a thing we enjoy, that’s why it’s critical that kids enjoy healthy foods. To make healthy foods desirable we need to employ all aspects of food joy: early and repeated exposure to achieve familiarity, social joy connected to healthy eating, and the expectation and belief that healthy food is delicious.

Healthy foods and drinks can be tempting, exciting and delightful.

It’s time we emphasized their wonderful taste with words and actions.

Dr. Ayala

Are late-night meals always bad for your waistline?

Eating after 8pm has been associated with weight gain. Some argue that our bodies have evolved to be active during daylight, and daytime is the best time to exercise, to think and to digest food, while nighttime is best for sleep and fasting. Messing with that natural rhythm increases the risk of obesity and also of diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

But what if 8pm is the middle of your day?

Many of today’s teens and college-aged kids are creatures of the night. They live in social jetlag. Weekend breakfast is an afternoon affair, typical dinner can only keep them going for so long, and they therefore eat a very late additional meal or snack. When your day begins at 12pm and ends at 3am, midnight meals are almost called for.

When the internal clock shifts in such a way do late meals still affect weight gain?

Social jetlag makes mealtimes relative

A new study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked not only at clock time, but also at the circadian timing – the body’s internal clock – and at body fat.

The study recruited 110 18-22 year olds, followed their sleep and wakefulness, regular daily routines, and all food intake using a time-stamped-picture app that was followed by nutritional analysis of the meals and snacks. On top of that, their melatonin release patterns were assessed in the lab – melatonin release above a certain concentration level is an established marker of our internal clocks’ night onset.

The researchers found that lean and overweight students had similar mealtimes if you looked at the clock.

But when you looked at these young people’s internal clocks it was a whole other story: lean people finished most of their daily calories 1.1 hours earlier according to the onset of their personal nighttime, as determined by their melatonin release. Those with more body fat ate more of their calories later according to their internal biological clock.

In this study, the biological clock mattered, not the actual time of day.

Which makes sense.

If you fly from San Francisco to New York in the morning, and get really hungry at 10pm Eastern Time, it’s hardly a surprise: This is a very ordinary time to eat dinner in Pacific Time. For many College kids the internal clock strikes 8pm at midnight, and by their own clock and metabolic point of view they’re not eating a midnight snack at all – this is just dinner.

Eat and drink better at night

This study suggests that the actual time of day and the setting of the sun matter less than what your internal clock is showing. The no-food-after-8pm is advice that doesn’t jibe with many young people’s sleep-wake routines.

Instead, I recommend stopping eating 2 hours before you go to sleep.

If you find yourself hungry at night, try hydration. People who feel hungry sometimes are actually low on fluids; they’re a little thirsty, and water or a non-sweetened no-calorie drink can alleviate this craving for midnight snacks. Drink, wait a bit, and see if the hunger subsides.

If you truly are hungry, do eat; what you eat matters more than the meal timing. Instead of highly processed, easy to grab junk food, eat a nutritious meal or snack, or another serving of fruit or nuts. One of the problems with late-night eating is that there’s no game plan, not many healthy options, and when you’re hungry at night your defenses are down. If you know you’re prone to late night eating, plan for it and have a few healthy options handy.

Dr. Ayala