Food chaining is a child-friendly feeding therapy strategy that is used regularly use during treatment sessions to help children experience success with eating. You may have heard your feeding therapist talk about food chaining and wondered what it is and how it works. Food chaining helps you understand why your child will accept certain foods and enables you to introduce new foods that build on the foods they currently enjoy and eat consistently. Food chaining works wonders for picky eaters and children with more significant feeding challenges and is a tool that can be easily done at home between therapy sessions.
Food chaining was developed by Cheri Fraker, an American Paediatric Dietician and Lactation Consultant specialising in paediatric feeding disorders. In her book Food Chaining: The Proven 6-Step Plan to Stop Picky Eating, Solve Feeding Problems, and Expand Your Child’s Diet Cheri describes that from her clinical experience she was then able to develop the six-step feeding therapy programme with food chaining as the final treatment step.
What is Food Chaining?
Food chaining is essentially a method of linking a new food to an already accepted or ‘liked’ food. Food chaining emphasises the relationship between foods by their sensory components, regardless of why your child is a selective eater. The foods your child already likes and accepts are the starting point for food chaining. We aim to food chain through a sensory experience, for example the texture, flavour, temperature and even the look of foods in your child’s repertoire. From there we identify similar foods to create the “food chain” or links between what your child already accepts and the new foods we would like your child to eat.
Why would I use Food Chaining?
There are several reasons we would use food chaining as a treatment in therapy sessions. The most obvious reason is that your child is lacking significant food groups in their diet. Most children with severe picky eating will have big gaps in the food groups they eat and many parents will have specific food goals for their child, such as introducing meat, fruit and vegetables. Another common reason is the restrictions on the family’s social activities and the feeing that they’re being controlled by their child’s eating. And similarly, you might be interested in food chaining if you find your child’s social engagement with friends is being limited by their feeding challenges. For example, they may not feel comfortable going to birthday parties or on school camp.
How do I use Food Chaining?
When initially working out what a food chain might look like for your child it is important to start identifying the sensory preferences in their preferred foods. By understanding what it is about their preferred foods that they like will assist in choosing the next little step on the food chain. We often start with foods that make a significant difference in a family’s day-to-day life or social interactions. A common food chain starts with a McDonald’s French fry. Many families I work with are going to McDonald’s every day because that is one of the only foods their child will eat. So, let’s look at a food chain that starts with a McDonalds French fry with the end of goal of eating potato topped pie. There are a number of steps in the food chain:
- Change the brand and introduce a French fry from another take-away (eg, Burger King).
- Oven-baked skinny fry at home
- Change the brand of the home cooked skinny fry
- Change the shape to a potato gem or hash brown
- Introduce a fatter oven-baked fry at home
- Introduce a plain potato wedge
- Move to a baked potato or filled potato
- Introduce mashed potato
- Finally mix the mashed potato with another food (such as shepherd’s pie)
Case example of using food chaining:
Another example from an eight-year-old girl who liked the flavour of soy sauce, but was having difficulty eating a variety of “dinner” foods. In discussion with the family we decided to start with soy sauce with the end goal of eating boiled rice at dinner time. This is the food chain we followed:
- We started by adding soy sauce to plain sushi rice (as she had enjoyed sushi rice in the past).
- Then we added seaweed with the sushi rice and soy sauce (dried seaweed was already a preferred food).
- The next step was to go to a sushi shop and order teriyaki chicken on rice (as chicken was a ‘sometimes’ food) with soy sauce.
- Followed with a home-made fried rice with soy sauce.
- Then finally we introduce boiled rice with soy sauce at home for dinner time.
Achieve the ‘Just Right Challenge’
Although this is many steps to achieve a goal it breaks a big goal into bite sized goals, making the challenge challenging enough but not too overwhelming. Food chaining is a good example of the ‘just right challenge’ which is always the aim in Paediatric therapies, as when children feel overwhelmed they are less likely to rise to the challenge – so to find that ‘just right challenge’ is essential to future success.
You may have noticed a common theme in all these examples. Food chaining isn’t a quick fix, the process can take a long time. You might have a big goal of introducing your child to quite a complex food, but you break it down into small steps so that your child is only doing a bite-sized challenge at a time. It’s important to set and focus on short-term goals and expectations so you don’t feel like there’s no progress being made. A child might need to try the same food anywhere between 10 – 50 times before it moves from being a “learning food” to a “like food”. Persistence on everyone’s part is a really key part of food chaining. If your child doesn’t accept the food on the first attempt, keep trying. If a new food isn’t successful you many need to find ways to modify it. It’s also really important to understand that some foods are more challenging than others and therefore each new food may take a different time to the previous food. In the book, Cheri recommends that one way to see progress is by getting your child to rank each food they try it on a scale of 1 – 10. What you should see over time is that your child increases the ranking to that food each time they are exposed to it.
Who can help me use Food Chaining?
Feeding therapists are able to determine why your child accepts certain foods and assist you to develop food chains that will help broaden your child’s diet. The food chaining process is often based on a child’s sensory-based assessment. As a paediatric Occupational Therapist, I look at a child’s sensory processing and determine what foods may be more desirable due to their sensory experiences.
Please join me for a Facebook Live talk all about Food Chaining.
If you are interested in finding out more about food chaining for your child, or would like an assessment of their feeding I would love to hear from you. You can contact me through Sprouts OT or the New Zealand Eating Disorders Clinic.
Please remember that this advice is sharing ideas about alternative ways to introduce foods in your child’s restrictive diet. I am not a doctor or dietitian, therefore if you have any specific medical concerns I encourage you to speak to your doctor or dietitian about what your child’s specific nutritional needs may be.