Get Your Kids to Eat Veggies by Covering Them in Candy

Here’s a shocker: If you want your kids to eat vegetables, it’s best to make them taste not like vegetables. Tell me something I don’t know! (I’m currently eating a carrot dipped in Marshmallow Fluff.)

Researchers at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Nutritional Sciences tested other ways to mask vegetable bitterness, including various salts, but plain sugar worked best. NO DOY.

In preliminary studies, preschoolers who were served lightly sweetened vegetables (sprayed with a mist of sugar) at lunchtime ate more of the healthy foods compared to those who were served unsweetened vegetables.

Although the researchers tested other ways to mask the vegetables’ bitterness, including various salts, plain sugar worked the best.

But, wait. How are kids supposed to learn to love veggies when we’re making them taste like lollipops? Isn’t that the equivalent of those children cookbooks that tell parents to use a syringe to squirt cauliflower into their child’s favorite Hot Pocket? Or, even worse, bake brownies with BLACK BEANS? Nightmares!

However, the researchers suggest that after the kids are tricked into craving broccoli that tastes like pop rocks, you do the old switcheroo and start serving the veggies plain. I wonder how that goes? Anyone with experience?

Other ways to get little ones to eat veggies include cooking them for between 6-8 minutes (not longer or shorter GODDAMMIT WHAT KIND OF A PARENT ARE YOU??), and being patient. Apparently, it takes kids about a dozen tries to learn to like a new food. Unless it’s sugar, and then we’re all basically Little Chrissy from Pecker.