Healthy Eating for Picky Eaters

Our son has food neophobia -- a genuine fear of food beyond picky eating -- and we recently discovered Centrum makes a fruit & veggie vitamin. We make sure he gets one every day (two is the adult dosage), so he has at least one serving in his body that way. Beats going without.

You could put "offensive" foods in front of our son 1,000 times, he won't eat them. Try to disguise them in any way, he figures it out immediately. We put our foot down once and he didn't eat for two days. Not all kids are easy fixes, contrary to popular belief. Even a therapist couldn't improve our son's eating.

I knew a mom with a very picky son who refused to eat veges. She would puree them and put them into stuff. Pureed cauliflower would go into the mashed potatoes. A variety of pureed veges would go into the spaghetti sauce (a little pureed spinach might also work here). She found many clever ways of doing stuff like that.

I too tried to use/put protein powders into smoothies. For me and my family, they always left an aftertaste. I finally gave up trying to use them.

I have one extreme picky eater and one who eats pretty much anything. I just make a healthy meal with separate foods...a veggie, a starch, a protein. If I am making a curry or a casserole or something all mixed up, I separate out some of the plain ingredients for my picky eater. He still has to try one bite of the casserole. Any time we are eating something he does not like he has to take one bite. I always make sure there is one thing he likes at the table. I don't make him a separate "kid food" dinner. In 8 years of being served all different kinds of food and always having to take a bite he has learned to like 3 new things. Sigh. That is not a good record. I used to mix in a teeny bit of spaghetti sauce with his noodles and over a year he learned to love spaghetti sauce. I used to make my mashed potatoes with about 1/3 mashed cauliflower. I did this for a couple years and now he will eat just plain steamed cauliflower. My friend used to make a homemade broth/soup for her boys out of tons of different veggies and chicken broth (homemade). She put it in straw cups with lids and they would drink it without seeing what it looked like. She said if they could see it they would not drink it. She got away with that for years. Btw, my son can taste protein powder too...he is like a super taster sometimes. I buy that pasta that is called protein plus and has protein in it....that helps.

I have made these before for my family, and asked permission to feed to daycare children in my home daycare (due to the protein powder). They ate them up!

http://www3.samsclub.com/meals/recipes/banana-protein-pic...

This is a great resource for all sorts of recipes, BTW. Who knew Sams Club had a recipe site? There is another breakfast bar in here with bananas and chex mix and peanut butter that my daycare kidlets LOVE LOVE LOVE (no protein powder in that one). Maybe you will find other things in this resource?

Good luck!

i just love the title of your question.

no experience with protien powder,

I had 2 picky eaters--- not any more.

I don't believe in hiding healthy food in stuff they like. Just give it too them. If you eat it they will eat it -- IF YOU GIVE THEM NO CHOICE. Make all healthy meals, make sure you have fruits and veggies with meals and make them eat a little. No spitting out -- no refusing -- no leaving the table until they eat a little of everything on their plate.

It took months but my kids learned to eat and look forward to what I cooked. Yep, at first I had great resistance, I had kids falling asleep at the table, I had crying, I had begging --- and I remained tough and they learned to eat.