How much do you blame American culture for our childhood obesity epidemic?
Childhood obesity is a big problem in America, but there are ways to teach kids to learn to love healthy foods instead of sugary, salty processed foods. Alan Greene, MD, shares some tips.
Transcript
Obesity epidemic is a metabolic ticking time bomb that really is threatening to overwhelm our health care
system and rob children and young adults of so much joy and life. [MUSIC PLAYING]
A lot of that comes from our American culture. We used to think that our food preferences were primarily genetic.
But it turns out we learn food mostly the way we learn a language. On a day that a child is born, they're
able to understand virtually any human language in the world, the click languages, the tonal languages. And it gradually shuts down to what
they're exposed to frequently. And it's like that with food. On the day a child is born, they're able to learn to like almost any food, any healthy food.
But that starts to shut down. And in the critical window, we've been exposing kids primarily to processed jarred foods that
don't taste like real foods. So they get-- they taste jarred peaches that taste like fruit cocktail. But then when they're later given a real peach,
they spit it out because they don't recognize it. The way that our taste buds are set up is actually pretty cool. We're drawn innately to glucose, to sugar because usually
in nature, those would be things that are good for us, a certain amount of salt. But we tend to reject anything that's sour or bitter.
And bitter you want to reject because it might be toxic somehow. Sour you want to reject because it might be spoiled somehow.
So it's only the things that you taste, on average, 6 to 10 times, up to 15 times, in that critical window
that you-- there's a switch that goes off in the brain. And you-- a metaphorical switch in the brain. And you suddenly recognize, yes, this particular green thing,
out of all the green things out in the yard, actually is good. And then you derive pleasure from it, but we've been missing that opportunity.
And in the 21st century, only 94% of parents will give up fewer than six times
trying a vegetable because they think, oh, this kid doesn't like broccoli, just like Dad. And they won't do it. And we know if you will just every day, give them one taste,
never push it. Never-- if they don't want it, stop. At the end of a week, 85% of them will love broccoli, or whatever their least favorite vegetable
was. [AUDIO LOGO]
child development
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