This week we tried this Simple Spaghetti Sauce recipe I stumbled across online. It only calls for three ingredients: A 28 ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes, an onion cut in half and 5 tablespoons of butter. It didn't call for any salt, seasonings, sugar, anything. Just those three ingredients and a little time.
Well, the results are in. Grown ups, after a few bites, were into it. Especially the grown up who made it (seriously easy, you don't even chop the onion, you cut it in half, let it cook, then throw the whole thing away!) It was a different flavor to the canned or homemade spaghetti sauce I have made before and took a couple of bites to get behind.
The younger participants of the meal panned it, hands down. They like the canned kind or homemade much better. I have a theory about this. Both the canned spaghetti sauce and the homemade have some sort of sweetener added. I went digging around the internet to back up my theory and found this quote from a study on Science Direct:
Children especially are vulnerable to the increased number of sweet products available. In general, children tend to have a much stronger sweet preference than adults (De Graaf & Zandstra, 1999). This exaggerated sweet preference has been described as a need for energy to invest in skeletal growth (Mennella et al., 2014), indicating that there is a physiological basis for children’s sweet tooth.
Anecdotally, I have noticed that the older I get, the less I reach for sweet things. I have also noticed that I actually now like "old people" food like Brussell sprouts, cabbage and bean soup. I also appreciate sour and bitter foods much more than I did when I was younger. And seriously, why do all my old people liked pickled beets and black coffee??? So there being some kind of biological reason for kids to prefer sweet things that drops off as we get older makes total sense to me. God and the creation of our bodies are kind of amazing.
However, it doesn't mean that our kids should only have sweet or sweetened foods. The biological drive that kept humans alive all those years ago is not the same circumstances that modern day humans find themselves in. So just because they are predisposed to preferring sweets, doesn't mean that is all they should or will eat.When introducing a food that is not immediately accepted the Mayo Clinic says a kid needs to try a new food up to 12-17 times, which is a lot of times! So if you are trying to introduce new foods or change old eating patterns, STICK WITH IT. It might take a while!
Comments
Post a Comment