Turn picky eaters from yuck to yum

Let's face it: We all have foods that we just don't really like to eat.

For me, I just can't embrace celery like everyone else, not even with a schmear of peanut butter and cute little "ants." For my husband, it's goat cheese. For others, it's root beer, olives or white chocolate.

A willingness to try new things is a virtue, and food is no different. No one wants to seem like an uncultured swine for not liking pork belly, but let's be honest, a chunk of seared pork fat has a texture that might not be for everyone.

And it's no wonder we don't like everything. With thousands of ingredients that can be combined in an infinite number of dishes, it's easy for your taste buds to feel overwhelmed. Eating involves all of our senses, so if the taste, texture, color or smell of a certain food isn't particularly pleasing, we tend to reject it. At least at first.

There's some truth to the old adage about having to try something 20 times before you like it, but for some people, especially children, sometimes you have to present it to them 20 times before they'll even think about trying it, says Lea Gebhardt, a registered and licensed dietitian with Nutrition Therapy for Kids who also works at Cedar Springs Austin, a clinic that specializes in treating people with eating disorders.

What causes pickiness?

With kids or adults, not liking a certain food can be a sign of a mild allergy or intolerance to that food. Some foods might make your mouth or lips tingle or cause your throat to itch, which are symptoms that an adult can verbalize, but small kids might just reject it but not be able to say why.

(But it often goes the other way, too. My brother-in-law jokes that he's allergic to eggs, onions and just about everything else he doesn't like because he knows it's more culturally acceptable to be allergic to something than to simply not like it.)

Pickiness in kids can be about control, but not always. "It's pretty rare that a kid is being picky just to be defiant," Gebhardt says. "They try to control two things — sleeping and eating — and if they have a good bedtime routine, there's usually something more to the pickiness."

Sometimes kids have neophobia (fear of new things) or sensory issues that extend beyond the mouth. In other kids, they have psychological issues around food that can stem from family or social problems or traumatic experiences, such as near-choking. Claiming not to like certain foods also can be a way to cover up other, more well-established eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia.

The next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is slated to come out in 2013, will likely contain about a half a dozen eating and feeding disorders, including sensory food aversion and post-traumatic feeding disorder. Officially recognizing some of these disorders will help professionals across the country learn how to treat them more efficiently and effectively.

Pickiness in adults

More research into severe pickiness in adults can't come soon enough for Bob Krause, who thought he was the only adult who suffered from it until he started an online support website, pickyeatingadults.com, in 2003. Since then, he's found thousands of other adults who struggle with the social, physical and psychological effects of not being able to eat "normally."

"Most foods do not look like food to my brain," he says. "My intelligence says, 'Yes, that is food,' but then part of my brain knows that it is way too complex or the wrong texture. I have a severe gag reflex that can make 'just take a bite' a very unpleasant experience." Even though Krause has become an advocate for adults in his situation, it wasn't until last year that he was able to bring up his eating disorder to his doctor. "He was just dumbfounded," Krause says.

Little is known about extreme pickiness in adults. Researchers with Duke University and the University of Pittsburg are conducting an online survey about finicky eating in adults (http://bit.ly/pickyeaterstudy) in an effort to understand unusual eating habits in adults.