Exposure: how many times should you serve a new food?

The stats on exposure

 

Anyone working in the field of food and feeding will be very familiar with the often quoted research on the number of exposures required before a child will accept a new food. Actually, studies vary; one says 8 – 15, another, ten, for example. Other evidence suggests that the number of exposures needed changes with a child’s age.

My personal feeling is that we should be very careful when applying research evidence from experiments in the general population, to very limited eaters. We just don’t  know how things like temperament, food-anxiety or sensory sensitivity impact how many exposures to unfamiliar foods children need.

Whatever figure you plump for, it is incontrovertible that multiple exposures are required. So what counts as exposure and how to we go about making it happen?

 

What is exposure?

 

I define exposure pretty broadly. At its simplest, it means enabling your child to experience a wide range of foods, repeatedly. It doesn’t mean making them eat them, it doesn’t even mean making them try them. Just having them around is all that is required.

If you eat an apple sitting next to your child, you’re exposing them to apple. If you and your child make an apple cake together, you are exposing them to apple. If the two of you chop an apple in half, dip it in some paint and make some fruit-prints, you are exposing them to apple.

Do we count exposures? Record whether we’re at 11 or 12… whether things are starting to go better as we hit the teens? Well, some professionals may suggest taking a systematic approach to serving new foods in some scenarios, but in the main, if we get too fixated on measuring how many exposures of each new food a child has had, this can lead to more anxiety and stress around meals, which can be really counter-productive.

If you do the math, imagine you serve a particular food once a month – multiply that by 12 for a whole year; you are just about hitting an optimal number of exposures after an entire year of persevering with a food. In fact, speaking from personal experience, I served my middle daughter mushrooms for three years before she decided to try them, and another year before she ate them.

“Serve everything that you would like your family to be eating, regardless of whether or not your child is able to accept it yet”

 

A powerful strategy

 

Making food that you strongly suspect will be rejected is a tough business. Waste feels horrible, it can feel really futile to prepare food that you are pretty convinced your child won’t eat (but you don’t need me to tell you that).

A great way to  move beyond concerns about food not being eaten is to use family style serving. This will enable you to get all of those valuable exposures in WITHOUT pressuring your child to eat.

Each element of the meal (including a couple of your child’s accepted foods) are placed in bowls or plates in the middle of the table and everyone serves themselves. You get to eat what you want, your child can feel good about meals because they can always trust there is something they can manage and they get exposed to a broad and varied diet.

Make sure you don’t take your child’s rejection of a food as a reason to keep it off the menu. Make sure your child gets to eat with you as much as possible – they will learn so much from watching you enjoying a varied diet! Make sure you give them as many (positive and pressure-free) exposures to new and non-accepted foods as you can manage.

This is not an overnight fix or a way to ‘solve’ picky eating but it is an essential piece of the jigsaw when it comes to helping children develop a positive relationship with food.