Paper on why children accept or reject foods

ESR3, Julia Sick at the University of Florence (Department of Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry) recently published her first paper “Children’s Self-Reported Reasons for Accepting and Rejecting foods” in the journal “Nutrients”. The paper is based on her Master  Thesis which was conducted as a part of Taste for life (http://www.smagforlivet.dk/) and supervised by Annemarie Olsen and Rikke Højer from the University of Copenhagen (Department of Food Science).

The publication investigated 10-13-year-old children’s self-reported reasons for accepting and rejecting foods. It was found that taste, smell and appearance of foods are important factors, but especially curiosity plays a crucial role when children decide to taste something new. In particular, girls were driven by curiosity, whereas boys were mostly driven by the expectation that the food tastes good. The results suggest promising insights into children’s reasons to accept or reject foods and that gender differences should be considered when investigating children’s food choices and preferences. More focus should be on the role of sensory attributes in food acceptance and rejection and the importance of children’s curiosity as a driver to accept novel foods. This knowledge can be used to increase the dietary variety of healthy foods.

The paper is open access and can be found here. 

 

ESR3, food choice, food rejection, gender differences, pre-adolescents