Shaping Food Preference and Taste of Young Children:

Posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

“We are What We Eat” this old Indian saying can accurately describe the current situation facing most of the world.

As it states we are what we eat, meaning eating high fat, high sugar unhealthy food will make us fat, unhealthy people. In turn, this will lead to increasing number of obesity-associated diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

In fact along with a dramatic decrease in physical activity, dietary habits are the cause of what is now know as this century’s epidemic: obesity.

What is more alarming is that this epidemic is now affecting younger age groups with increasing proportion of infants and children being in the overweight zone compromising their health as children and future adults.

Food choices are one major culprit in this situation, the ready availability and low cost of high fat, high simple sugar foods with no real nutrient value makes them an attractive food option, both for their palatability and relative low cost. To further highlight this point, results from a recent survey of more than 3000 children and teenagers showed that almost half of children’s total energy intake came from non-essential sugar and fat and that the intake of only 1% of children met all dietary guidelines. In other words, children consume too much energy rich non-nutritive foods and not enough low-energy nutrient-rich foods.

What make a person choose a specific food item instead of another? Food choices are a result of different interplaying conditions, what a child chooses to eat or what makes his daily diet plan is the sum of his genetic, cultural, social and economic status. In addition to that, food preference, commonly confused with taste preference plays a major role. This is a very important point because it can have major lifelong consequences, meaning, it is possible that food preferences formed early in life persist to affect adult food selection; that is what a child learns to like in his early years can built his food preferences and food choices as an adult. This is why shaping food preferences early in life can have major health effect for a whole generation and for their lifetime.

What is food preference?

Food preference is the selection of one food item over the other. While this selection in adults can be affected by cost, healthy nutrition awareness and personal preference, in children it is mostly affected by personal liking, knowledge and money concern not being yet applied. So, what a child chooses to eat is usually what he likes and what he is used to. So, many questions arise in this situation: What if liking of certain foods can actually be learned? Can it be possible to make children actually like their fruits and vegetables? Can carrots and broccoli be the new treat for a more trained youth? Can low sugar, low fat, whole carbohydrate food choices become the first choice of children? The answer to these questions is YES, but first we have to understand how food preference is acquired and what is the best way to positively shape it.

 

How is food preference built? Is it an innate or learned process?

So what initially shapes or affects child’s food preferences?

Food preferences develop very early, even since the womb depending on the mother’s diet. When we are born, we already have innate taste preferences: newborn infants respond positively to sweet tastes and negatively to sour and bitter tastes.

So, at birth, sweet taste is preferred and sour and bitter are rejected; as for preference for salt, it emerges by approximately 4 months of age. And by early childhood, children’s most preferred level of salt is more concentrated than that preferred by adults, a pattern similar to that noted for sweet solutions.

Another food preference of young children is that for high-fat foods. This preference is possibly due to fat’s pleasant feeling of satiety in response to hunger and its association in many foods containing sugar and salt, both of which are preferred tastes among children. This also highlights another point for food preference, children tend to like or dislike foods according to postingestive feeling, meaning a food that lead to nausea or discomfort will be hereon avoided, wheras food associated with pleasant feelings will be liked and chosen subsequently.

Also, it is known that children tend to prefer foods that are familiar and tend to reject any new food, a process termed Neophabia or fear of the new, this happens independently of the foods’ sensory characteristics.

In summary, we have inborn genetic predispositions that initially constrain food preferences, and these are:

• Predisposition to prefer foods that are sweet and salty and to reject those that are sour and bitter
• Predisposition to reject new foods (neophobia) and to learn preferences for the more familiar
• Predisposition to learn preferences by associating foods with the contexts and consequences of eating them.

This might suggest that food prefernce is "built-in" and difficult to change, but lukily research does not support this conclusion. Responses to basic tastes change with a child’s repeated experiences with foods. In fact, children’s preferences develop over time and are acquired via experience. The early years are a key time for experimenting with and establishing dietary habits.

 

So the major question is how can parents and caregivers positively and effectively change children food preferences towards a healthier and more nutritious direction.

 

The Do’s and Don’ts in shaping children food preferences:

Although genetic predisposition, as mentioned above, have a role in shaping initial food preferences, studies suggest that environmental factors are more important in the established food preferences of humans.

Parents should know that young children are capable of learning to like and accept a wide variety of foods, even those foods that people automatically assume children will never like, and this learning occurs rapidly during the first few years of life. So, it is very important to understand how early learning and experiences lead to the development of food-acceptance patterns, and how this in turn can help create healthful patterns of eating.

After an exclusive milk diet in the first month of life, the challenge begins with the introduction of new foods.Given the predisposition that we are born with, meaning tendency towards sweet and salty taste and energy dense food, and rejection of sour and bitter taste and rejection of any new food, introducing vegetables and complex carbohaydrates which are neither sweet, salty, nor energy dense, is initially rejected by children. Fortunately, studies have shown that repeated exposure to a new food can reverse rejection to acceptance. But parents should be aware that this process may require a long time and sometimes as many as 10 exposures are necessary in order for a child to start appreciating a new food.

Therefore, in order to make a child accept a new food repeated exposures are needed. In addition to that, the context and the way the child is exposed to a new food are very important.

A new food should be presented in small amounts along with other already known foods. The child should be encouraged without too much fuss and no punishment behavior to try the new food, along with his meal. This behavior should be repeated on several occasions until the food is accepted. In addition, the social context in which foods are presented influences whether they are accepted. Children are more likely to eat in emotionally positive atmospheres. Also, siblings, peers and parents can act as role models to encourage the tasting of novel foods, a child observing a closed person consuming a certain food will be more likely inclined to try it.

Since the ultimate aim is to shape food preference that can last through adulthood, some parental behavior that are extremist might have negative effects in the long run. Restricting access to particular foods increases rather than decreases preference and forcing a child to eat a food will decrease the liking for that food. So the popular concept of restricting children’s access to snack foods actually make the restricted foods more attractive, and leads to children’s greater selection and intake of restricted than unrestricted foods.

Also, using the reward approach cannot help creating lifelong good eating habits. If a child is given foods as rewards for approved behaviors, they will like and accept this food better, whereas when children are offered rewards for eating (for example “If you eat your vegetables, then you can watch TV”), the foods eaten to obtain rewards become less preferred.

 

Conclusion:

So far, traditional strategies to improve dietary habits consisted in providing people with basic nutrition knowledge hoping that it will help them make the right choices in selecting their and their children food intake. These strategies have not proven to be very efficient since we are still witnessing an increase in the prevalence of obesity and consumption of energy-dense foods, high in sugar, fat, and salt still constitute the bulk of the American diet for all age groups.

Given these reasons, it is quite logical that an alternative strategy would be to teach parents about child taste development that can help them use better strategies in trying to shape the new generation food preferences and implement lifelong healthy dietary habits