4. Nutrition Behavior Development of food preferences

How are food preferences established?

Majority are learned?

What are inborn preferences and aversions?

• Preference for sweetness = inborn

• Aversion to strong bitter and sour = inborn

• Preference for salt is learned in the first year of life

What compounds are responsble for the different flavors?

• Sweet = CHO

• Umami = protein

• Fat = fat

• Salt = fluid balance

• Sour and bitter = danger

How does preferences for taste change in babies?

• Preference for sweet is inborn, increases first year, decreases at 12 months

• Preference for salt not present at the start, developing with six months and increases until twelve months

• For bitter & sour no differences in intake at 3, 6 and 12 months, differences present with facial expression (neg)

• For umami no differences in intake and no reaction on facial expression at 3, 6 and 12 months

Development neophobia in relation to age

Mechanisms to learning to like taste/flavors

Exposure/familiarization to learn new foods

▪ Repeated exposure (how many times is needed)
▪ Exposure to variety and neophobia/tasting new foods
▪ Critical periods, when & what
▪ Change in optimal levels of sweet, sour, salt
(reformulation)

Effect of prenatal and postnatal exposure

• Mothers who consumed carrot juice daily for 4 days per week for three weeks had children that liked carrots more than mothers who did not do it

• Also children who had mothers who consumed carrot juice during lactation had the same effect .

Is exposure effect stable?

• Studies found that when exposing child (6-12 months) to disliked vegetable consistently eight times then they will like it more.

• This effect remained the same after 9 months, they still liked this initially disliked vegetable.

• Further studies showed that effect lasts up to a year but not at 1.5 years of age.

Children eating in absence of hunger

Children as young as ~ 18 months eat in the absence of hunger

Flavor-flavor learning and its effectiveness as compared to exposure

• Pairing of an initial neutral stimulus (e.g. odor) with a positive or negative stimulus (e.g. sweet or bitter taste)

• Change in valence/liking

• Vegetable with apple sauce; tomato ketchup (apple sauc, tomato ketchup is not only taste, also energy)

• Flavor-flavor learning is not necessarily better than exposure, results are very similar.

Flavor nutrient learning

• Effect in humans is present, although difficult to reproduce earlier results

• Why difficult? Large offer of food, not hungry?

• In baby’s toddlers flavor-nutrient learning is not more effective than repeated exposure

Food and social reinforcement