Why Childhood Feeding Habits Shape More Than Nutrition – An Interview with Anastasia Schenk
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
Anastasia Schenk is a Pediatric Feeding Specialist and Integrative Nutrition Health Coach who reversed her own autoimmune condition through nutrition and now helps families build a healthier relationship with food from the very first spoonful. As founder of Early Eaters Club, she works where clinical feeding science meets lived experience, with a focus on picky eating, gut health, and the early years that quietly shape a lifetime of eating.
In this interview, Anastasia explains why feeding shapes far more than nutrition, what the convenience-food era is quietly costing young children, and how parents can take the pressure off the table without giving up on real food.
Anastasia Schenk, Pediatric Feeding Specialist/Integrative Nutrition
What first made you realize that childhood feeding habits shape far more than nutrition alone?
It crept up on me. I trained thinking the job was nutrients. Iron, fats, the right amount of protein at the right age. Tidy, measurable, the kind of thing you can put in a chart.
Then I started watching what actually happened at the table, and the chart fell apart. A toddler refusing everything green was not being difficult for sport. He was telling me something about texture, about control, about a meal weeks earlier that had gone badly and got quietly filed under danger. Food was never just food to him. It was memory, safety, autonomy, the first place he got to say no and have it mean something.
That reframed the whole job for me. What a child learns at the table, they carry well past it, whether to trust their own hunger, how to sit with discomfort, whether the adults feeding them are on their side. We think we are building eaters. We are building a relationship with the body that outlasts childhood by decades, and nobody hands you a manual for that part.
How did reversing your own autoimmune condition change the way you approach pediatric feeding today?
It changed everything because it dragged the theory out of my textbooks and onto my own plate.
For years, I was told my condition was something to manage, not something to question. Take the medication, expect a slow decline, that is simply how these things go. Nobody asked what I was eating. Nobody connected the inflammation in my lab results to the food I was putting in three times a day. When I finally started treating food as information rather than fuel, my body answered. Not overnight, and not by magic. But it answered.
That rewired how I see children. When one arrives with eczema, permanent congestion, a stomach that always hurts, and reflux that everyone shrugs at, I no longer see a tidy list of separate problems to medicate. I see a system trying to get a message through. We are remarkably good at silencing those messages in children and calling it treatment.
I treat feeding as the earliest and most repeated lesson a body ever gets. I learned that the hard way, on myself, which is not the route I would recommend.
Why do you think picky eating is still misunderstood in many families and even within healthcare?
Because we have been handed a story that is convenient for everyone except the child.
The story says picky eating is a phase, or bad behaviour, or proof that a parent is too soft. All three are comforting, because they put the blame somewhere tidy and let us avoid looking harder. The truth is messier. Some children are genuinely wired to taste bitterness more sharply. Others are quietly recovering from a feeding experience that scared them. A few have a gut or sensory issue that nobody has thought to check.
Healthcare is not built to catch any of this. A standard appointment runs ten minutes, and feeding usually gets a weight check and a cheerful “he’ll grow out of it.” Most clinicians were never trained to tell the difference between a fussy eater and a child whose nervous system has decided the dinner table is enemy territory.
So families are left improvising, normally with bribery and crossed fingers, which makes the whole thing worse. The child is rarely the problem. The map we were all given is.
What concerns you most about the rise of convenience foods and pouch-based feeding for young children?
It is not the occasional pouch in a handbag that worries me. We have all been there, parked outside somewhere, buying ninety seconds of peace. It is what daily reliance quietly takes away.
A pouch asks nothing of a child. No biting, no chewing, no wrestling with a piece of food that refuses to slide straight down. We are raising the least practised jaws in human history, and the body builds what you ask it to build. Less chewing reshapes the jaw, the airway, and even how a child sleeps. None of that prints on the label.
Then there is taste. Pouches are sweet, smooth, and almost identical from one brand to the next. A child raised on them learns that food should be sweet and effortless, and then we act betrayed when broccoli flops at age three.
Convenience is not the villain. I have two children and a deep respect for exhaustion. My worry is that we have let convenience become the default instead of the exception, and a small body gets exactly one run at learning how to eat.
What is one mistake parents often make when introducing solids that can create long-term feeding challenges?
Starting with bland, single-note cereals and then keeping everything smooth for months longer than needed.
There is a stubborn habit of opening with baby rice or oat cereal because it feels gentle. The catch is that a baby’s digestive system in those early months is primed for fat and protein, not for a heavy load of starch. The enzyme that breaks those cereals down has barely clocked in. So we lead with the one thing the gut is least ready for, wrapped in a flavour that quietly teaches a child food is beige.
The second half of the mistake is staying on purees out of nerves. Texture is a skill, and skills have windows. A baby who never meets lumps and soft finger foods at the right age tends to refuse them later, once the window has narrowed and everyone is more anxious about it.
My rule is unglamorous. Real food, real flavour, real texture, earlier than most parents are told. Babies are far more capable than the cereal aisle gives them credit for.
How can parents reduce mealtime anxiety without turning food into a daily battle?
Step out of the role of enforcer. The second a meal becomes something you win or lose, you have already lost, because a child can out-stubborn you on this every time. It is the one lever they fully control, and they know it.
The shift that rescues most families is splitting the job. You decide what is served, when, and where. Your child decides whether to eat it and how much. It sounds almost too small to matter. In practice, it lifts an enormous weight off the table, because you stop negotiating and they stop performing outrage for an audience.
Then turn the temperature down. Eat together when you can. Put the new food on the table with no speech attached and no pressure to touch it. A child often needs to see something ten or fifteen times before going near it, and every calm exposure counts, including the ones that look like nothing happened.
You have not failed because dinner was quiet and barely touched. You are playing a long game, and calm is how you win it.
What role does gut health play in a child’s behavior, immunity, and relationship with food?
A far bigger one than most people are ready to hear. A huge share of the immune system actually lives in the gut, and in early childhood, the whole thing is still under construction. The mix of bacteria a child builds in those first years helps set how their immune system reacts, how they handle food, and even how steady their moods run.
This is the part that surprises parents. The gut and the brain are in constant conversation, and not always a polite one. A child carrying low-grade gut inflammation can be irritable, foggy, a poor sleeper, quick to melt down, and none of it looks like a tummy issue from the outside. It looks like behaviour.
Diversity is what builds a sturdy gut, and diversity comes from variety on the plate, real fibre, and fewer additives elbowing the good bacteria aside. The narrow beige diet we hand so many children does the precise opposite.
I tell parents to stop picturing the gut as plumbing. It is closer to a second brain, and we are feeding it whether we mean to or not.
Why is emotional safety at the table just as important as nutritional quality?
Because a stressed body does not digest, learn, or trust well, children eat with their entire nervous system, not just their mouth.
Think of the tensest meal of your own childhood. The order to finish, the plate was going cold while somebody made a point of it. Most of us can feel it in our shoulders instantly. That stress response shuts digestion down and files the whole event under threat, and do it often enough, and a child starts bracing before they have even pulled out the chair.
You can plate up the most flawless, nutrient-dense dinner ever assembled, and if it lands with anxiety attached, the child’s system is too busy defending itself to absorb much of it. Nutrition and emotion are not separate tracks. They travel together, always.
This is the line I most wish parents heard. A relaxed meal of imperfect food beats a tense meal of perfect food every single time. We pour so much energy into what sits on the plate. The mood around it matters at least as much, and usually more. The table is the first conversation a body ever has.
If every parent could change one thing about the way they feed their children, what would you want it to be?
Stop treating every meal as an exam you can pass or fail.
If I could change one thing, it would be the pressure. Pressure to clean the plate, to finish the vegetable, to hit some invisible standard by bedtime. It always comes from love. But it quietly teaches a child to eat for approval instead of hunger, and that is a lesson that can take decades to unlearn.
Feeding a child well is not a daily test. It is a slow, repetitive, mostly unglamorous practice of offering good food in a calm room and trusting the child to meet it in their own time. Some days, it looks like a balanced plate. On plenty of days, it looks like three bites of pasta and a flat refusal on everything else. Both are completely fine.
Pull the camera back. You are not raising a single dinner. You are raising an eater for life. If parents could hold onto that one idea, the table would get lighter, and so would they.
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