Born Craving a Balanced Diet?
Kathryn Rodriguez
Article Summary
Source: Discover Magazine (online)
Date Published: January 21st, 2016
This article was written about whether we are born with an instinct to choose a well-balanced diet. In the article, the author talked about a study that was conducted in the 1920’s and 1930’s where a pediatrician, Clara Davis, took infants and gave them a variety of food choices and without having any social influences on them, she had them eat what they desired. The results of this study showed that infants chose foods that they needed for a well-balanced diet which led people to believe that this was a genetic component that we are born with. In this article, the author brought up the fact that Clara Davis also talked about how the options she presented with these infants were also all healthy options. This piece of her experiment was often left out but as we look at whether our food choices are primarily based on nurture or nature, it is important to realize that these infants were offered healthy food and then they were allowed to choose what they wanted.
Article Critique
After closely looking through the article as well as the website, a key thing I have noticed is there isn’t much information about the author. She wrote a book based on the experiment done by Clara Davis called, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. After searching for more information on this author, I found out that she is a British food journalist. She doesn’t have any medical credentials and she gets her information from researching other experiments and scientists and then she puts the pieces together. I think that if this article had a sponsor or another author who had credentials that would make this article a lot more reliable. Although the article was extremely well-written, I think that it could be a little confusing as to what exactly the author was trying to say. I think that people could get the idea that they should let their kids eat whatever their kids want because they will crave a well-balanced diet, but the piece of information about the fact that Clara Davis only offered the infants healthy options may be missed by some. This article is based on scientific evidence but the research was done almost 100 years ago and I think that it would be much more reliable if the information was from research that was done more recently. I think it would be very interesting if the author or another person did more current research to share with people now. I also think that if there were more options listed for parents to feed their infants or let their infants choose from, that would help this article a lot and would help parents with using this information.