First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

benign, without paying attention to the way in which Davis had changed the food environment in which the babies ate. Her work was seized on as proof that our individual appetites are messages encoded with exactly the nutrients that our particular body needs. If we need protein, we will crave chicken. If we have rickets, we will naturally gorge on vitamin D until we are cured. All we have to do to eat well is listen to our cravings. Mother Nature knows best. Davis herself gave license to such a view, commenting that the children’s successful “juggling and balancing” of more than thirty essential nutrientssuggested “the existence of some innate, automatic mechanism  . . . of which appetite is a part.”
    Influenced by Davis, the dominant view on appetite among pediatricians became “the wisdom of the body,” which went along with the vogue for “child-centered” learning. In 2005, Benjamin Scheindin, MD, a pediatrician, noted that Davis’s work had contributed to a widespread change in attitudes in pediatric medicine from the 1930s onward. Where a previous generation lamented the pickiness of children’s changeable tastes, now doctors positively welcomed childish vagaries of appetite. Dr. Benjamin Spock, author of the best-selling Baby and Child-Care , first published in 1946, devoted ten pages to the Davis experiment. A mother, in Spock’s opinion, “can trust an unspoiled child’s appetite to choose a wholesome diet if she serves him a reasonable variety and balance.” It didn’t matter if a child developed a temporary dislike of a vegetable, because his or her cravings would naturally provide everything the child needed in the way of nutrition.
    Many experts in child-rearing still think like this, operating on the assumption that children are born with special appetites for exactly the nutrients they most need and that it will all balance out, if only they are given free rein to eat what they like. A book on solving children’s eating problems that went through several reprints in the 1980s and 1990s argued that Davis’s work showed that children should be given total control over food selection: let them eat cornflakes! As recently as 2007, a popular website about feeding children discussed Davis and concluded that there was “a strong biological plausibility  . . . that children will instinctively choose a balanced diet.”
    The “wisdom of the body” is an alluring thought (like maternal instinct and other biological myths). Eating would be such a simple business, if only we had little memos inside our bodies telling us what we needed to eat at each precise moment (your vitamin C levels are dropping—quick, eat a kiwifruit!). If only we liked just the stuff that was good for us and disliked anything superfluous or bad. We can certainly learn to get better at reading the body’s cues for food, but this tends to come with age and experience, as you notice little things like how pasta for lunch makes you sleepy, or that a handful of nuts and acup of Greek yogurt keep you full longer than white toast and jam. But children’s omnivorous bodies—after the milk stage, when breastfed infants do self-regulate—are not so wise.
    Many children habitually seek out precisely the foods that are least suitable for them. They crave sugar and shun green vegetables. They neglect to drink enough water. Nutritious meals are rejected, while junk is revered. Can we really believe that a preschooler demanding a packet of the latest sugary kid’s breakfast cereal, having seen it on TV, is responding to the body’s need for certain vitamins and carbohydrate?
    The scientific evidence—both from humans and rats—shows that the theory of the “wisdom of the body” is flawed at best. For the theory to be true, omnivores would need to have specific appetites for the essential nutrients the body needed at any given time. This is a very unlikely proposition, given that the list of nutrients needed by omnivores