Let the kids eat…anything, anytime?

An interview with New York Times with an anti-fatphobia activist caused a reaction in the United States. In summary, Virginia Sole-Smith allows her daughters to eat anything, anytime, so they can learn to eat according to their own needs. The Press brought together two experts to discuss this… questionable approach.

Who are they ?

Julie St-Pierre

The D^D Julie St-Pierre is a pediatrician and lipidologist. She is the founder of Approach 180, an interdisciplinary approach to the prevention and management of obesity. She is the author of Restoring health to the whole family And Everything is decided before 2 years.

Karine Gravel

Karine Gravel is a nutritionist and doctor of nutrition. She is interested in intuitive eating, the relationship with food and body image. She is the author of From diet culture to intuitive eating: thoughts on eating in peace and enjoying your thighs.

At New York Times, Virginia Sole-Smith explains that her pantry is full of snacks – Goldfish, green pea chips, but also cookies, Welsh jujubes, chocolate – and that she leaves her daughters, aged 6 and 10, in eat as they please, even before meals or instead of meals. Is this what intuitive eating is?

KG and JSP : No.

kg : I’m not surprised that this interview caused such a reaction in the United States, a society obsessed with thinness and dietary control. Here we are completely at the other extreme. In fact, children need flexible supervision. It’s not about having lots of restrictions, but that’s not what she’s proposing either. Eating intuitively means eating the foods you want, but it also means eating to feel good in terms of quantity and food choice.

JSP : Intuitive eating also means learning to discover our hunger and satiety signals. If the child no longer has supervision, is allowed to gorge himself on chocolate biscuits and has a slight addiction to sugar, he will never learn to listen carefully to his hunger and food signals. satiety. Sometimes we eat out of boredom. Many articles show this, and the pandemic has been a shining example: when we lose supervision and children use themselves as they want, that’s when we observe a deterioration in their cardiometabolic health.

Intuitively, a child will not necessarily eat what will make him healthy, such as fruits, vegetables, whole wheat?

JSP : No. Food has an effect on dopamine receptors. Certain products will please our brain more than others, and the child will gravitate towards these choices naturally if left unsupervised.

kg : I think of the example of the nine Oreo cookies in the article New York Times [Virginia Sole-Smith indique que, lorsqu’elle reçoit à la maison les amis de ses enfants, ceux-ci mangent neuf biscuits Oreo]. If someone eats too much, my instinct will be to figure out what’s going on. Is this never offered at home? Some parents want to do so well that they never buy anything commercial. Deprivation can lead to a greater desire for food when it is too strict.

JSP : We should not demonize the Oreo cookie either. As a pediatrician who works in obesity, I buy Oreo cookies twice a year, and I’m not going to let my child have nine. Nine Oreos are 75 grams of sugar. For a 6-year-old child, the World Health Organization recommends a total intake of 12.5 grams of free sugar per day [5 % de l’apport énergétique total].

When we restrict consumption to two biscuits, isn’t the child at risk of developing an obsession?

JSP : If the child is not satisfied with Oreo cookies, it may be because he did not eat breakfast in the morning or did not eat nutritious snacks afterward. noon. He will arrive home and gorge himself on a pleasure food. The child who took about twenty minutes with his parents to eat well, with his portion of whole grains, proteins and vegetables, has little risk of eating nine Oreo cookies after the meal. In an ideal world, where the Mediterranean approach would be accessible to everyone, we would consume pleasure foods twice a week, three times maximum.

kg : With children, we can draw inspiration from shared responsibility. Parents decide what foods are offered, with a variety of healthy and less healthy foods, they decide the meal time and they make sure the atmosphere is pleasant. The child’s responsibility is to manage quantities. The child can also make choices, for example fruit or yogurt for dessert. We can offer other desserts, sometimes – like cookies, in a flexible and random way.

JSP : The danger of allowing constant freedom is to create picky eaters. We often see adolescents who do not eat any vegetables, in a situation of serious obesity, and we have to resort to bariatric surgery or medication when we could have made them aware at a very young age…

To a certain point, should children be forced to eat vegetables?

kg : The sweet taste is a taste that we say is innate, whereas for other tastes – including bitter taste – it can take between 10 and 15 exposures to a new food before getting used to it. If the child doesn’t like it at first, parents should still add a little bit to the plate. It’s an exploration. There’s something playful about that.

JSP : We can start this very early. We take a small notebook from Dollarama and the children have to draw the food it tastes like or put a sticker on it. They add a smiling little man, an unhappy little man, or even a half-happy little man. We taste it up to 15, 20 times, cooked, raw, frozen, seasoned… Parents also participate. And the only thing we impose is to no longer say: “I don’t like that”. It works extremely well.

Read the article from New York Times (in English, subscription required)