How information about what is “healthy” versus “unhealthy” impacts children’s consumption of otherwise identical foods

Abstract

Can brief messages about health influence children's consumption of identical foods? Across a series of studies, we manipulated children's consumption of identical foods (fruit sauces) by pairing those foods with brief messages about each food's health status. What initially appeared to be a preference for foods described as healthy among 5-6-year-old children (Studies 1-2) actually reflected a preference for alternatives to foods described as unhealthy (Studies 3-5), including comparison foods that were described with negative or neutral content.Although the two foods on each trial were identical, children consistently ate more of the alternative to a food described as unhealthy. Similar effects were observed among 8-9-year-old children (Study 6). These results demonstrate that children's eating behavior is affected by messages they receive from other people, including messages about health. Further, these studies reveal basic psychological mechanisms that contribute to children's choices among foods, which could lead to effective interventions in the food domain.

Show or tell: Children's learning about food from action vs verbal testimony

“…Among food secure families in the study, maternal food intake (but not maternal food talk) predicted children's food intake ‐ the more mothers ate, the more children ate. This study provides an initial suggestion that observing another person eat might be an especially strong influence on children's eating behavior (compared to hearing someone talk about food), in addition to prior findings that verbal messages can influence children's food intake 29,33 . Nonetheless, given that this was an observational study and food talk could take a variety of forms, additional research is needed to more thoroughly understand how action and verbal testimony compare as guides to children's eating behavior.…”

“…Nonetheless, the trust in testimony literature is mixed in its practice of labeling informants as teachers or highlighting other features of the learning context, raising the questions of whether it is necessary or sufficient to label the informant as a teacher to invoke a learning context. Some studies in the trust in testimony literature directly label informants as teachers, either as a general procedure 29,33,65,66 or because the study directly compares a teacher to another type of informant 67‐70 or assesses teaching quality 71 . Other studies do not label the informant as a teacher 72‐74 or may have difficulty doing so because they manipulate the informant characteristics, 75 such as comparing adults and children, 30,76,77 people from different cultural groups, 26,27,78 or nice vs mean people 79 .…”

“…Research from the field of social cognition has demonstrated that preschool‐aged children are sophisticated social learners: They consider who is more of an expert when learning from other people and reject information provided by people who have a history of unreliability (e.g., they inaccurately label common objects) 24,25 and are more likely to endorse the information provided by members of their own cultural group (e.g., children report that the correct use for an unfamiliar object is the way the ingroup member used it) 26,27 . Specific to the context of food, children also learn about foods from what others tell them, including whether foods taste good, 28 are popular with other children, 29 and are healthy 30‐33 . However, it is unknown how modeling via action (actually seeing someone eat a food) versus verbal testimony (hearing explicit verbal messages about food) compare directly as guides to children's eating behavior (and their social learning more generally).…”