Advantage Speech & Language Services

     Myths surrounding eating are plentiful.  Everyone who has a child will give you “their expert two cents” on how to get your picky eater or problem feeder to eat.  I’ve heard seasoned medical professionals advise parents that their child “will eat when he’s hungry.”  For children with true feeding disorders, this advice can be devastating to a child and the family.  There remain far too many misconceptions about what is considered normal when it comes to eating.

     The information listed below is based on Kay Toomey’s copyrighted research.  Research has proven the following myths to be invalid:

MYTH #1:  Eating is the Body’s number one priority.     False!

BREATHING is the Body’s Number One Priority.  Without good oxygenation, eating is resisted because the airway is briefly occluded with every swallow and our oxygen level decreases.  In some children, there is a significant increase in respiratory rate to maintain oxygen such that they are burning off any calories they take in.

POSTURAL STABILITY (“not falling down”) is the Body’s Priority Number Two.

EATING is the Body’s Third Priority!

MYTH #2:  Eating is instinctive.     False!

Eating is only instinctive for the first month of life.  After the first month of life, we have a set of primitive motor reflexes (rooting, sucking, swallowing) which take over and keep us eating while we lay down pathways in the brain for voluntary control over eating. Between the end of the 5th or 6th months of life, these primitive motor reflexes drop out and eating is essentially solely a learned motor behavior.

MYTH #3:  Eating is easy.     False!

Eating is the MOST complex physical task that human beings engage in.  It is the ONLY human task which requires every one of your organ systems and requires that those systems work correctly.  In addition, EVERY muscle in the body is involved (one swallow, for example, takes 26 muscles and 6 cranial nerves to coordinate).  Plus, eating is the ONLY task children do which requires simultaneous coordination of all of our sensory systems.  Kids with sensory integration challenges and/or those with tonal differences may have feeding challenges.

MYTH #4:   Eating is a two-step process; First you sit down, then you eat.     False!

There are actually around 32 steps, more or less, involved in the process of eating.  Some children have aversions to the sight or smell of foods, others textural aversions.  A trained therapist can determine in which step a breakdown is occurring.

MYTH #5:   It is not appropriate to touch or play with your food.     False!

Wearing your food is part of the normal developmental process of learning to eat it.  You can learn a great deal about food, before it gets into your mouth, by touching it and playing with it first.

MYTH #6:   If a child is hungry enough, he/she will eat.  They will not starve themselves.     False!

This is true for about 94-96% of the pediatric population.  For the other 4-6% of the pediatric population who have feeding problems, they will “starve” themselves (usually inadvertently however).  For the majority of these children, feeding doesn’t work and/or it hurts, and no amount of hunger is going to overcome that fact.

Children are organized simply.

If it hurts, don’t do it.

If it doesn’t work; cry and/or run away.

Children who have structural or muscular differences, or reflux issues, often have appetite suppression over time.

MYTH #7:   Children only need to eat 3 times a day.     False!

In order to meet their daily calorie requirements, children would have to eat adult sized meals if they only eat 3 times a day.  Given their small stomachs and attention spans, it takes most children 5 -6 meals a day to get in enough calories for proper growth and development.

MYTH# 8:   IF a child won’t eat, there is EITHER a behavioral OR an organic problem.     False!

Various research studies, and the data from years of research by Kay Toomey and Associates, indicates that between 65-95% of all children with feeding problems have a combination of behavioral AND organic problems.  If you have a physical problem with eating, you are going to quickly learn that eating doesn’t work, it hurts, and you will develop a set of behaviors to avoid the task.  If you start with a purely behavioral/environmental reason for not eating, your compromised nutritional status will quickly begin to cause organic problems.  They generally coexist.

MYTH #9:   Certain foods are only to be eaten at certain times of the day (i.e. Breakfast foods only for breakfast, lunch foods only at lunch, snack foods only at snacks, dinner foods only for dinner), and only certain foods are “healthy for you!”     False!

Food is just food.  It is not breakfast food, or lunch food, or dinner food, or snack food, or junk food.  Food is either a protein, a carbohydrate or a fruit/vegetable.  While some foods do have more nutritional value than others, labeling foods as “good” or “bad” or “only to be eaten at X meal”, is not helpful in teaching children to eat or to have a healthy relationship with food.  If a child eats chicken and peas best at breakfast, that's  okay.  In addition, the so called “junk foods” actually play a huge role as stepping stones in teaching children with feeding difficulties to learn to eat a wide variety of other foods because these “bad foods” are typically easy to manage from an oral-motor standpoint, and/or they have a large sensory appeal.

MYTH #10:   Mealtimes are a solemn occasions.  Children are to be seen and not heard.     False!

Feeding is supposed to be fun.  Children eat so much better when their food is engaging, interesting and attractive.  They also eat better when mealtime conversations are focused on talking about the food and teaching the” physics” of food.  So go ahead, enjoy your food and the feeding experience with your child!  Be noisy and play with your food!