How many times does your picky eater need to try a new food before they will like it?

The idea that there is a certain number of exposures required before a child will accept a new food has been around for a while. I remember hearing this (I think from UK celebrity chef Jamie Oliver?) way before I even had a child of my own, and my eldest is now a teenager…

A quick google search unearths the following claims:

From Zero to Three: In the ‘How to handle picky eaters’ section, is the claim “a child may need to be exposed to new foods more than 10 times before they try it”.

From Eat Fresh: Beneath the quote “My child refuses to eat vegetables” is the statement: “New foods may take some time — sometimes 10 or more tries!”

And what does the research itself say? Well, Dr Lucy Cooke published a review of the research into the role of exposure in relation to children’s eating *. She mentions several studies with various findings, including the following:

• Five to ten exposures were needed to increase how much two year olds like new cheeses and fruits (Birch and Marlin, 1982; Birch et al., 1987)
• Eight to 15 exposures were necessary to increase three to four year olds’ liking of sweetened, salted or plain tofu (Liem & De Graaf, 2004)
• Eight exposures to orangeade with a sweet taste were required to enhance eight to eleven years olds’ preference for the drink (Liem & De Graaf, 2004)

Since Cooke’s (2007) review, more work has been done in this area, for example, Lakkakula et al., 2010**, which found that elementary school children claimed to like previously disliked vegetables after eight or nine exposures.

There are subtleties in these findings, such as the fact that the number of exposures required for the acceptance of a novel food appears to alter with age, but what I really want to draw attention to is that, in every single example cited above, the data is taken from a random sample of children of a particular age. In other words, they are not specifically researching kids with eating issues.

The only study I could find that looked at how many exposures are required in children who had feeding problems, had a sample of six. *** This is an an extremely small sample size and the findings should be viewed with caution.

Let’s look back at the quotes from websites that I shared above – the articles indicate that they are talking about ‘picky’ eaters, but they use stats from studies looking at the general population. We can’t extrapolate the findings from these studies to children with feeding problems.

I believe that exposure is super important (in fact, I have written about this elsewhere) but what I want you to know, as the parent of a child whose relationship with food may be complex, is that these ‘ten exposures and they will like it’ claims do not apply to your child.

Yes – keep on exposing your child to a wide variety of foods (in a pressure-free way that is not stressful for them) BUT please don’t expect that after ten exposures they will eat something new. Please don’t feel that you are doing something wrong if you have exposed your child to a new food fifteen times and they STILL won’t even contemplate trying it.

When it comes to food-anxious children, there is no magic number. Each child is different and every family is on their own journey. So yes, remember that exposure is a really important piece of the puzzle but please take these stats with a pinch of salt and never use them to beat yourself up with.

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*  Cooke, L. (2007). The importance of exposure for healthy eating in childhood: a review. Journal of human nutrition and dietetics, 20(4), 294-301.

** Lakkakula, Anantha, James Geaghan, Michael Zanovec, Sarah Pierce, and Georgianna Tuuri. “Repeated taste exposure increases liking for vegetables by low-income elementary school children.” Appetite 55, no. 2 (2010): 226-231

***Williams, K. E., Paul, C., Pizzo, B., & Riegel, K. (2008). Practice does make perfect. A longitudinal look at repeated taste exposure. Appetite, 51(3), 739-742