What to Do About Your Picky Eaters Around the Holidays

And just one more comforting bit of fact-based assurance: Much if this food avoidance is genetic, and well beyond what parents did or didn’t do! Have you noticed how many of the siblings of picky eaters are adventurous and not picky at all? A recent study of 1,932 sets of twins, 626 of whom were identical, measured food fussiness by a 35-item questionnaire. If pickiness were a totally environmental – learned at home – behavior, you’d expect the fraternal and identical twins to have the same level of pickiness. But that’s not what the researchers found. There was a higher correlation of food fussiness between the identical twins.