Susan Phillips' 4-year-old son Alex eats vegetables every day -- he just doesn't know it. Phillips purees his servings of green beans, spinach, sweet potatoes and squash and hides them in a peanut butter and brown sugar-sweetened porridge that she makes for him each morning.
Without the deception, she says, Alex would eat no vegetables and very little fruit. His resistance is so strong that she has pretty much stopped putting them on his plate and requiring him to take a taste.
"I didn't want to get into big battles over food," says the Los Angeles-based environmental science professor. "Peanut butter hides the flavor of almost everything."
Everyone hopes that their kids will eat their fruits and vegetables so they'll grow into big, strong adults who will eat the nine daily servings recommended by the U.S. government. But everyone also knows kids rarely put "broccoli" at the top of a list of favorite foods.
So an increasing number of parents are loading the foods their kids will eat with produce they think they should be getting. And food makers are lending a hand, offering a growing array of processed foods that sneak vegetables and fruits into chips, juice and nuggets.
But some nutritionists and public health experts wonder if parents these days are relying too much on the sneak attack. They doubt if kids will ever develop a taste for vegetables in all their leafy glory if they are hidden in smoothies and macaroni and cheese. Some say this well-intentioned sneaking could produce kids less likely -- not more -- to eat greens.
"Children should learn to make healthy choices," says Pat Crawford, co-director of the Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley. "It really comes down to whether we are feeding our children for nutrients, or for the potential development of healthy patterns that are lifelong."
Many mothers say they were turned on to hiding vegetables in their kids' foods by bestselling cookbooks such as Jessica Seinfeld's "Deceptively Delicious" and Missy Chase Lapine's "The Sneaky Chef." Both offer kid-friendly recipes with hidden vegetable and fruit purees in such items as pizza and pasta. Lapine advocates mixing jars of vegetable baby food into soups and sauces if parents don't have time to cook and mash produce themselves.
