A speaker argues that forcing kids to eat undermines their natural ability to sense what's safe and healthy. Strapping them in high chairs, using distractions, and pushing processed foods teaches children to ignore evolutionary signals that protected humans for hundreds of thousands of years.
We take these screaming, starving children and put them in a high chair and strap them in. And then we take this completely dead, nasty, oxalate-filled food, put it in front of them, fight with them for 45 minutes to eat this food and laugh about it, make up little games about airplanes going into hangars and trains and race cars and all these things to try to get them to eat this food. And meanwhile, they're spitting it up and throwing it across the room. What we're essentially doing is teaching them to not trust their senses. We have these senses— our smell, our taste, our feel— all of these senses are the product of millions of years of evolutionary pressures. Well before books and nutritionists and doctors and podcasts and all the cooking shows, the first thing we did was see it. The next thing we did was touch it. The next thing we did was smell it on our way to our mouth, and we started chewing, and then we got all those responses. And you know what? It's worked really well for 300,000 years. In fact, so well that our bodies and our brains grew to modern proportions. Very, very safe. But we are teaching our kids to not trust their senses.
