If you need proof that language is powerful, here’s some. Researchers at Cornell recently reported that kids are more likely to eat their veggies if they’re told the food has enticing names like “X-ray Vision Carrots” and “Dinosaur Broccoli Trees.” Wonder how big a grant the researchers got to study what every parent already knows. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Clever Veggie Names”
Sure, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but will giving vegetables different names encourage preschoolers to eat more of them?
Well, it turns out a professor at Cornell University actually got money to study this very question with a group of four-year-olds.
It seems that in this study, 186 children were given regular carrots for lunch, and then the next day they were given carrots. They were renamed X-ray vision carrots.
And on that day, the kids ate twice as many, and the same thing proved true for power peas, dinosaur broccoli trees, and tomato bursts, further proving that language is powerful.
Grant, does that work with you and your kid?
It does actually work with my son. My son is about two and a half, and if you feed him stuff at the table, he won’t eat it. But if you say, oh, here’s a snack, and put the exact same thing in a bowl and, like, set it next to him off of the table, he’ll eat it. Just because he understands that snack is somehow special and the meal at the table isn’t.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you could have gotten grant money to research this even further with your kids.
Let me get on that.
Okay.
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