After I wrote that young children may be picky eaters because they are offered unhealthy food, some readers disagreed. But here is another example:
I myself have been amazed to see hungry young chicks refuse to touch a purified diet until we added thiamin, which we discovered to have been accidentally omitted from a published formula.
From Kenneth Carpenter’s excellent Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B (2000), p. 193. If young chicks can better judge the nutritional quality of food than nutrition professors, perhaps young children can, in some situations, better judge the nutritional quality of food than their parents. And rightly decide that food their parents think is healthy isn’t so healthy.
Andrew, I’m not saying that kids always know best. That’s absurd. What isn’t absurd is that we have inborn mechanisms that help us choose a healthy diet. Many parents fail to understand this. It means that when a kid refuses a food there may be at heart a sound reason. And this quote supports that idea.