Leann Birch, a scientist who has helped difficult children and their parents, died at the age of 72.



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In the world of the daily worries of parents of young children, meal time ranks tops the list: do they eat too much or not enough? Why are they loaded at tea time, then sit and play with their food during dinner? And how to persuade them to eat peas and carrots?

Leann L. Birch, a developmental psychologist who died of cancer on May 26 at the age of 72, has devoted more than forty years to the study of child nutrition, revolutionizing a field formerly largely limited to nutrition issues. Eating healthy foods, she said, is far more complex than consuming calories and vitamins – and does not have to be the daily struggle of many parents.

"Every parent wants their child to grow up well and thrive, and I think that in terms of nutrition, a lot of parents basically understand what a healthy diet looks like," Jennifer Orlet Fisher, a former student of Dr. Birch & s and assistant director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University said in an interview.

"But how to get kids there, how to get them to like eating healthy foods is a whole new challenge," she added. She said Birch's research had provided the first "scientific foundation for understanding how children develop what we like and dislike in food and how parents can really support experiences." that help them develop a healthy palate.

Through carefully designed studies, Dr. Birch has revealed flaws in the meal strategies used by struggling parents. These include reminding the children to "clean their plate" or to eat "five other bites", to offer a dessert as a reward and to limit the children's diet to butter pasta, fingers of chicken and other essentials from the restaurant's kids menu. .

Babies, she pointed out, are born knowing how to regulate their food consumption. They eat when they are hungry and stop when they feel satiated. Moreover, their palace is a tabula rasa. It is only when children grow up, absorbing the influence of their parents and other people around them, that they learn to love certain foods, such as sweets, and to divert them from their homes. Others, such as lima beans.

Dr. Birch and the pediatricians over whom she has had influence have taken advantage of this knowledge to deter parents from the common instinct to put more and more food in their children's mouths.

"There should be a division of responsibility as to who is responsible for the diet of the children, even as a child of preschool age," she said. "It's the responsibility of parents to provide a healthy range and many opportunities to sample new foods. But it is at the child's job to decide how much food to eat. "

Such an arrangement, she conceded, "makes many parents nervous."

Children, she has shown, know instinctively how many calories they need, and allowing them to self-regulate allows them to eat healthier in the long run. In one experiment, the children were fed a low-calorie or high-calorie yogurt before being offered lunch of their choice. Regardless, both groups of children chose meal options that resulted in approximately equal calorie consumption.

Dr. Birch suggested to parents small, difficult consumers to tell their children that mothers and fathers could recite to their children in another context: If you fail at the beginning, try trying again.

Children, she said, are predisposed to resist new flavors. But with repeated exposure (it has sometimes shown that eight to 15 trials were needed), they would venture far beyond the crackers. Young people in his studies learned to appreciate exotic items such as lychee nuts, jackfruit and papaya.

Dr. Birch advised parents not to encourage their children too much when they were done with a serving of vegetables, lest they suggest that eating healthy foods is a chore. For the same reason, she advised against extending the desserts as a bribe. Prohibiting sweet or fatty foods is also not effective, she said; they simply turned the desired treatment into a forbidden fruit.

Overall, Ms. Birch's work provided an encouraging message to parents.

"In the absence of pressure to actually consume it," she told NPR, "children will generally learn to eat a lot of new things."

Leann Elsie Traub was born in Owosso, Michigan on June 25, 1946. Her father was an engineer and her mother was a housewife.

She grew up mainly in Southern California and obtained a Bachelor of Psychology degree from California State University in Long Beach in 1971. She completed her graduate studies at the University of Michigan, where she graduated in 1973 and a doctorate in 1975. in psychology.

Dr. Birch taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before joining Pennsylvania State University, where she was Director of the Center for Research on Childhood Obesity, in 1992. She taught since 2014 at the University of Georgia, where she directed the Obesity Initiative.

Dr. Birch has promoted interventions to help parents adopt healthy eating habits early in life – when many mothers and fathers use food as an all-purpose soothing tool – until they are healthy. in adolescence, when eating disorders can set in. It is credited with leading role in the fight against the growing scourge of childhood obesity.

"His work, which was innovative in the lab, is now probably the most effective approach to preventing obesity in the early days of life," said Ian Paul, pediatrician and professor at Penn State College of Medicine. .

Dr. Birch's first name was Lipps, the surname of her first husband, from whom she had divorced. His second marriage, with David Birch, also ended with a divorce.

Survivors include her husband for 35 years, Karl M. Newell of Ocean Isle Beach, N.C .; and their two children, Charlotte K. Newell of New York and Spencer H. Newell of Washington. His daughter said that Dr. Birch had died at a hospice in Durham, NC, causing cancer.

Dr. Birch's colleagues noted that any parent who had previously consulted the pediatrician for a visit to healthy children had received a sheet of advice suggesting that they persisted in offering new vegetables to the children was the beneficiary from his work.

"It is hard to believe that there was never another way of thinking about child feeding," wrote Alison Ventura, a former student of Dr. Birch's and a professor at California Polytechnic State University.

"As a mother of my two children, I am also grateful to have learned from her all that I have done to feed the children," she continued. "My boys are incredibly healthy, eat very well and really like vegetables! In all honesty, I can say that the time I spent in her lab, thanks to the lessons of her and her research, helped me to become the mother that I am today. ; hui.

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