Why your children dislike sukuma wiki

Most Kenyan households eat kales (sukumawiki) on a daily basis. If this is your home, your children are likely to resent the vegetable. Here's why: According to Kepha Nyanumba, a consultant nutritionist at Crystal Health Consultants Ltd, children may grow to dislike sukumawiki because of monotony. He advises parents and caregivers to feed their children with a variety of vegetables to break the monotony as well as provide them with the necessary nutritional requirements.

"It's advisable to include a variety of vegetables when feeding children. These will provide them with the nutrients they need for growth and development," he said, adding that children with digestive disorders such as acidity are likely to dislike kales since they are known to worsen the condition.

According to researchers from Durham University, the relationship between kids and different food types begin much earlier in life during pregnancy. They argue that a pregnant woman's diet influences the baby's taste preference after birth.

The researchers took scans of 100 pregnant women at 32 weeks and 36 weeks. 4D ultrasound scans reveal that babies smile when their mum eats carrots - but grimace when she opts for kales - reports the Daily Mail.

Professor Jackie Bliessett of Aston University, a co-author of the research argues that repeated prenatal flavour exposures may lead to preferences for those flavours experienced postnatally.

Another co-author of the study Miss Ustun adds that, "Repeated exposure to flavours before birth could help establish food preferences post-birth which could be important when thinking about messaging around healthy eating and the potential for avoiding "food-fussiness" when weaning,"

The team of experts has now embarked on another study with the same babies post-birth to examine whether fetuses show better responses to the flavours over time.