Mother always said you have to eat a food to learn to like it. New research backs up that premise and takes it a step further. Preschoolers not only know what they like—sugar, salt and fat—but they also know which brands of food satisfy their individual palates.
According to a study conducted by T. Bettina Cornwell, a University marketing professor in the Lundquist College of Business, and Anna McAlister, a consumer science researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, children as young as 3-years-old who have a strong knowledge of fast food and soft drink brands also tend to have a high preference of sugar, salt and fat in their diets.
Cornwell said these children exhibit "flavor-hit behaviors", meaning they request certain flavors be added to foods they eat to match their taste preferences, such as ketchup, and seek out foods higher in flavor, including flavored potato chips or sour candies.
In a world where salt, sugar and fat have been repeatedly linked to obesity and poor health outcomes later on, waiting for children to begin school to learn how to make wise food choices is a poor decision, said Cornwell. "Our findings present a public policy message. If we want to pursue intervention, we probably need to start earlier."
Over the past two decades, the prevalence of obese children has doubled, while the number of obese adolescents has tripled, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
Childhood obesity is linked to numerous health problems including asthma, sleep apnea, skin infections, menstrual abnormalities, joint pain, type II diabetes, high blood pressure and some cancer types. Childhood obesity can take its toll on emotional health as well, leading to low self-esteem, negative body image and depression, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Parents should seriously consider the types of foods they expose their young children to at home and in restaurants, says Cornwell. "Repeated exposure builds taste preferences by programming the brain and these preferences can last a lifetime."
For the first experiment, 67 children and their mothers were recruited from preschool classes in a large city. The mothers completed a 21-item survey identifying their children’s taste preferences while children arranged the tastiness of 11 natural and 11 flavor-added foods displayed on picture cards without labeling or packaging.
Researchers found strong agreement between parent and child perceptions. Parents noted their child’s desire for foods high in sugar, fat and salt, while the children showed preference for flavor-added foods— cheese puffs, corn chips, watermelon hard candy, jellybeans, banana soft candy, strawberry ice cream, ketchup, colas and chocolate milk— which contained these ingredients.
In the second experiment, Cornwell and McAlister compared 108 children’s taste preference to sugary, sweet or fatty food to their awareness of fast food and sweetened beverage brands.
Each child was shown 36 randomly sorted cards relating to two popular fast-food chains, two leading cola companies and six depicting irrelevant products. All children were able to correctly place some of the product cards with the correct companies, indicating their differing levels of brand recognition.
The results, which appeared in the journal Appetite, "suggest that fast food and soda brand knowledge is linked to the development of a preference for sugar, fat and salt in food." The relationships, the authors wrote, appeared to reflect the children's emotional experiences to brand-named products that deliver their developed taste preferences.
“When parents repeatedly serve certain foods, their children acquire a taste for them and soon recognized what brands deliver that taste," Cornwell said. Earlier research has shown that children given red peppers on 10 different occasions will acquire a taste for red peppers and that logic extends to other foods.
Lynette Summerill is an award-winning writer who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. In addition to writing about cancer-related issues for EmpowHER, her work has been seen in newspapers and magazines around the world.