Chicago Tribune

When your child is a picky eater, everyone has advice: Cook with your kids! Eat like a French person! Roast those Brussels sprouts!

Jessica Seinfeld, wife of the comedian Jerry, advocates pureeing, say, butternut squash or cauliflower, and sneaking it into a familiar food such as mac and cheese.

Nancy Tringali Piho, author of the book “My Two-Year-Old Eats Octopus: Raising Children Who Love to Eat Everything” thinks it would be great if you could introduce your child to a wide range of exquisitely prepared foods from around the world, preferably before he's out of the high chair.

You could easily spend all day and a sizable trust fund following the most popular recommendations — and still see your young child spit a seemingly harmless food (homemade chicken nuggets, sliced cucumber) right on the plate. That is, if you are lucky enough to achieve that one precious second of mouth-to-food contact.

So what's a busy parent to do? Like many parents of the young and the picky, I'm basically concerned with increasing vegetable consumption — not, say, with impressing the other restaurant patrons with my kid's passion for octopus. I also place a pretty high value on my own time and effort. So, with those factors in mind, I redirected my efforts: I resolved that I would continue to try new techniques for promoting vegetable consumption, but not only those that had proven effective in large studies published in respected scientific journals.

That, as it turned out, left me with surprisingly few options.

“The vast majority of scientific research has been through repeat exposure,” says Terence M. Dovey, a lecturer at the Centre for Research into Eating Disorders at Loughborough University.

“You show (the food) once. You show it again. You show it again. You show it again. And at no point do you force the child to eat it. Eventually, the vast majority of children will accept the food.”

There's plenty that researchers don't know about picky eaters, starting with the basics, such as how many there are. Estimates vary widely, from 8 to 50 percent of kids, with researchers differing on how to define the term. Some allow parents or caregivers to define pickiness, others look at how many foods kids actually eat, and some look at average kids during some or all of the peak pickiness years: ages 2 to 6.

“The research is a bit hampered by that,” says Lucy Cooke, a senior research associate at the Health Behaviour Research Centre at University College London.

“The definition of picky eating is a very wishy-washy one; it's hard to tell what people mean.”

Even in the case of the relatively well-tested repeat exposure, the evidence of effectiveness is “pretty good” as opposed to very good, says Dovey. The difficulties, he says, lie in the studies' focus on single foods such as kidney beans (but not popular combined foods such as chili) and in the fact that many of the studies take place in schools, where, scientists suspect, kids tend to be more flexible and obedient than they are on their home turf. (If scientists need any parents to vouch for that, I'm available.)

Still the evidence for repeat exposure keeps piling up; a 2007 review of scientific studies by Cooke in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics found repeated exposure can increase liking and consumption.