Kids eating Habits.....

(Relaxnews) - Instead of trying to pull a fast one on your children and hiding vegetables in their food, a new study suggests it's more important to expose kids to variety in order to develop better eating habits.

In recent years, food writers have been coming out with a slew of children's cookbooks that encourage parents to use a little stealth and strategy to increase their kids' vegetable intake, with titles like Deceptively Delicious and The Sneaky Chef.

But a study published in the March/April issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior has found that parents may be underestimating their children's taste buds and unnecessarily engaging in 007-style kitchen trickery.

For their study, investigators from Columbia University presented 68 elementary and middle school children with a taste test. Samples were presented in pairs and were either labeled accurately as broccoli gingerbread spice cake, for example, or simply gingerbread spice cake.

What the students didn't know was that both samples contained the veggie ingredients.

Interestingly, researchers found that when it came to samples of zucchini chocolate chip bread or broccoli gingerbread spice cake, the kids expressed no taste preference between the samples given.

Where they did express a preference, however, was with the chickpea chocolate chip cookies, indicating they liked the sample labeled chocolate chip cookie better.

This could be explained by the fact that 81 percent of the kids said they were unfamiliar with chickpeas and had never tried any in the past year, investigators said.

"These findings are consistent with previous literature on neophobia that suggests that children are less apt to like food with which they are unfamiliar," said lead author Lizzy Pope in a statement. "Since the majority of students had had broccoli and zucchini within the past year, it appears that there must be some familiarity with a vegetable for the labeling of the vegetable content not to influence taste preference."

The moral of the story? Resist the urge to trick kids into eating their veggies and acclimatize them to the food group early by presenting them with a wide variety of options, researchers suggest.

While Jessica Seinfeld's wildly popular book Deceptively Delicious suggests passing off puréed cauliflower for cheese in a revamped macaroni and cheese recipe, Whining and Dining by Eshun Mott and Emma Waverman suggests that rearing healthy, open-minded eaters begins by sitting down to a family meal at least once a week.

Another study published in January found that kids preferred eating off plates laden with colorful foods and fun patterns or designs.