Food Jags: What Parents Need to Know

What is a Food Jag?

A food jag is when a person eats the same food, prepared the same way, every day. As adults, many of us engage in food jags with our breakfast meal – we eat the same cereal, or the same yogurt, or the same type of bread toasted (with the same spread), etc. every day. For people who are adventurous eaters, engaging in a food jag at one mealtime is not a problem because they will eat a range of foods at other meals and snacks throughout the day; and, when they get tired of the food on which they are jagging, they will eat something different, perhaps coming back to the food they jagged on weeks or months later.

However, for children who are picky eaters, food jags can be a big problem. This is because when picky eaters eventually burn out on their food jag, many permanently drop that food from their repertoire. By definition, picky eaters already have a limited number of foods they eat, so loosing a food to food jag burn out is a big problem.

Preventing Food Jags

There are two ways to prevent food jags:¹

1. Offer any given food no more than once every other day.
2. If your child does not eat a wide enough variety of foods to allow them to not repeat a food for two days in a row, change a sensory property of their food each time it is offered. The same sensory property should be changed (in a different way) each day for two weeks before moving onto the next sensory property.* Sensory properties include:
   • Shape – Take a small piece off the corner, cut the food in half, change the shape with a cookie cutter, etc.
   • Colour – Add a drop of food colouring (make sure this does not change the flavour).
   • Taste – Add a new flavour to the food by adding a different spice, some cheese, butter, a spread, etc.
   • Texture – Change the texture of the food by adding an extra egg or oil to the mixture, chop up fruit or add seeds, cook the food into a different texture (e.g. an omelette vs. eggs), etc.
   • Temperature – Change the temperature of the food (if appropriate based on safe serving guidelines).

* It is important that you don’t distress your child when making changes to their food. The change should be a “just noticeable difference,” meaning it is a small change that your child notices but does not find so distressing that they cannot eat the food. The size of change that a child can tolerate is different for every child; you know your child best, start small and build gradually.

If you would like more information about food jags, children’s feeding development, or feeding therapy with South Lakes Speech & Language Therapy, please get in touch. Follow us on Facebook for more speech, language, and feeding tips, and sign up for South Lakes Speech & Language Therapy’s newsletter if you would like new posts sent directly to your inbox.

1. Adapted from the SOS Approach to Feeding ↩︎