Children’s Erratic Eating Habits Seen as Normal : Nutrition: The youngsters have an innate ability to regulate their overall food intake to compensate for meal-to-meal variations, a study has found.

Anxious parents should not worry about the erratic eating patterns of young children because youngsters have an innate ability to compensate for meal-to-meal variations by regulating their overall food intake, according to a new report.

The detailed study of 15 normal preschool children in Illinois found that each child had a “relatively constant” daily caloric intake despite a highly variable intake at individual meals.

“The successful feeding of children is best accomplished by providing them with a variety of healthful foods and allowing them to eat what they wish,” the researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Procter & Gamble Co. wrote in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

“As a parent (with a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old), it certainly makes me feel better,” said Leann L. Birch, the leader of the research team. “It is clear from this study that you can’t look at individual meals and draw any conclusions.”

Many parents, as the researchers point out, become distressed because their youngsters eat “like a bird” on one occasion and “like a horse” at another time. Moreover, the foods that are gobbled up one day may be rejected the next.

As a result, parents often try to force children to eat with greater regularity, a strategy that the researchers termed counterproductive.

In designing the study, the researchers conjectured that the swings in eating from meal to meal may not be of great significance over the course of a day.

Fifteen normal preschool children were studied--seven girls and eight boys ranging in age from 2 to 5 years. They were free to eat what they wished from standard menus of food that the researchers provided.

The children’s daily food intake was measured by weighing every food serving both before and after meals and snacks on each of six study days over a three-week period.

From day to day, a child’s caloric intake at a particular meal or snack varied by as much as 100%. But overall daily calories varied far less; typically about 10%, according to the study.

A medical journal editorial observed that the young children “did not eat to excess,” despite an excess of food that was made available to them.