About Us

My wife and I had a BIG problem in the form of a little person – the youngest of our four children just would not eat vegetables.  We have been so fortunate to have our other three kids eat well balanced diets with lots of fruits and vegetables, so the prospect that our youngest wouldn’t follow in their footsteps had never actually occurred to either of us.  But boy, were we in for a horrible, awful surprise! 

My wife and I know how important fruit and vegetables are, particularly for kids who are still developing their bodies and minds, so allowing our daughter to march through her childhood without getting the nutrients from fruit and vegetables was simply not an option.  In fact, after dealing with a particularly awful tantrum at mealtime, my wife more or less told me that I needed to fix the situation.

If my story sounds similar to your own then I’m not really surprised.  I started asking my friends and family whether they had ever dealt with this issue and, honestly, if I heard someone say once “let me know when you have this figured out because my kids/spouse/parent/self also won’t eat fruit or vegetables” then I heard it a million times.  It seems that literally everyone has the exact same problem! 

To solve the problem I did all the same things you probably have tried:

• Don’t let her leave the table until she has tried a vegetable and/or fruit;
• Introduce only one fruit or vegetable at a time;
• Have her participate in making the meal;
• Have her participate in shopping for fruit and vegetables;
• Make eating fruit and vegetables into a fun game;
• Cut fruit and vegetables into attractive/fun shapes…

You name it, we tried it and nothing worked.  This process for us literally spanned several years, and actually even continues to this day!  The problem was that until such time as my daughter (hopefully) learns to like eating fruit and vegetables, she is not getting the nutrition she needs with all of the negative consequences that this entails.

This was the genesis for ENOF.  I needed to get the nutrition from fruit and vegetables into my daughter in a way where she wouldn’t completely freak out.  I considered just giving her a multivitamin or a supplement, but, after I researched these, I discovered that they are not even remotely close to providing the nutritional benefits one gets from actually eating a vegetable.  In addition, a lot of the supplement powders are really bulky and the prospect of making my daughter eat a shake or smoothie every day was also not appealing.

What fell out of this experience is what you see here on our website and in ENOF.  I hope that the solution I developed for my daughter is something that you can use too to help solve whatever nutrition problem you are trying to address.

Mark Gillis
President & Chief Health Officer