My 5-year-old granddaughter politely asked her mother if she had to eat her roll at dinner. “No,” said her mother, “if you don’t want to eat your roll, you don’t have to.” With that, my granddaughter removed the middle of the roll, shoved her green beans inside and threw the roll away.
-James Randolph, Cookeville, TN (Readers Digest, Dec. 2025, p. 17)
Getting kids to eat their fruits and vegetables – and making sure they eat enough of them – is a constant struggle for many parents. Even kids who aren’t prototypically picky eaters may shy away from eating their greens. Fruits, which are typically bright colored and sweet, are a much easier sell. It’s getting kids to eat their vegetables that may require parents to get a little creative.
How many fruit and vegetable servings should children be eating each day?
Moderately active children between the ages of 4 and 8 are supposed to be eating an average of 1 1/2 cups of fruit and 2 cups of vegetables each day, yet most families fail to reach this standard. (Hellmich, 10-27-2009) A full 86% of kids in the are being nutritionally malnourished and deprived of the fruit and vegetable intake they need..
Will giving my kid a multivitamin make up for their lack of fruit and vegetable intake?
Many parents assume that they can make up for a child’s picky eating habits simply by giving their kid a multi-vitamin each day. Yet this is no substitute for actual fruits and vegetables. Time and time again, in study after study, vitamins fail to confer the same nutritional health benefits that come from eating these nutrients in foods. The body has a harder time absorbing nutrients from a vitamin, and they just aren’t the same. Most vitamins that come in pill form are flushed right out of the system. As one doctor eloquently put it, the primary benefit attained from a multivitamin is to give a person “expensive pee.”
There’s just something about the nutrients in actual foods that simply can’t be replicated by sticking folic acid and other substances in a vitamin pill. Vitamins may be helpful if a child has a specific nutritional deficiency, and it’s certainly alright to give a child a daily vitamin for good measure. It may not help that much, but it’s unlikely to do any harm. However, vitamins ARE NOT a substitute for a healthy diet, and they will never make up for a lack of fruits and vegetables in a child’s diet.
Kids’ favorite fruits & vegetables
According to a survey by the NPD Group’s National Eating Treds Data, when kids do eat their fruits and vegetables, here’s what they go for:
Top 5 favorite vegetables for kids (ages 6-12)
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Corn
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Green Beans
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Carrots
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Peas
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Mixed veggies
Top 5 favorite fruits for kids (ages 6-12)
1. Apples
2. Bananas
3. Grapes
4. Strawberries
5. Oranges
Most of the items on this list are common staples. But try to expand your child’s palate beyond these things. There are hundreds of different types of fruits and vegetables, so make it a goal to discover new ones and find ways to serve them to your kids.
The more you serve vegetables and the more you eat them yourself, the more apt children are to enjoy these food items and make healthy choices on their own. It’s a process that should start early. When children are infants, many parents see the faces their baby makes at the first taste or pureed peas, and so they switch back to something more palatable. This is a grave mistake. If your baby makes faces, that just means you should be giving them those foods more often. And don’t restrict yourself to the classic jars of pureed carrots, green beans, or peas, either. Grab some different vegetables from the store that baby hasn’t been exposed to yet and puree them into baby food with a blender.
“The good news is that kids who eat a variety of fruits and vegetables at age two are likely to continue to do so,” says Dr. Alan Greene (2009, p. 211). Unfortunately, many of the parents reading this book didn’t get such an ideal early start. So the next section will help you expand your child’s vegetable intake at later ages:
Additional tips on getting kids to eat fruits & vegetables can be foud in our book Picky No More: