Strength or Nausea? Children’s Reasoning About the Health Consequences of Food Consumption

Abstract

Children’s reasoning on food properties and health relationships can contribute to healthier food choices. Food properties can either be positive (“gives strength”) or negative (“gives nausea”). One of the main challenges in public health is to foster children’s dietary variety, which contributes to a normal and healthy development. To face this challenge, it is essential to investigate how children generalize these positive and negative properties to other foods, including familiar and unfamiliar ones. In the present experiment, we hypothesized that children might rely on cues of food processing (e.g., signs of human intervention such as slicing) to convey information about item edibility. Furthermore, capitalizing on previous results showing that food rejections (i.e., food neophobia and picky eating) are a significant source of inter-individual variability to children’s inferences in the food domain, we followed an individual approach. We expected that children would generalize the positive properties to familiar foods and, in contrast, that they would generalize more often the negative properties to unfamiliar foods. However, we expected that children would generalize more positive and less negative properties to unfamiliar sliced foods than to whole unfamiliar foods. Finally, we expected that children displaying higher levels of food rejections would generalize more negative properties than children displaying lower levels of food rejections. One-hundred and twenty-six children, aged 3–6 years, performed an induction task in which they had to generalize positive or negative health-related properties to familiar or unfamiliar foods, whole or sliced. We measured children’s probability of generalization for positive and negative properties. The children’s food rejection score was assessed on a standardized scale. Results indicated that children evaluated positively familiar foods (regardless of processing), whereas they tend to view unfamiliar food negatively. In contrast, children were at chance for processed unfamiliar foods. Furthermore, children displaying higher levels of food rejections were more likely to generalize the negative properties to all kinds of foods than children displaying lower levels of food rejections. These findings entitle us to hypothesize that knowledge-based food education programs should take into account the valence of the properties taught to children, as well as the state of processing of the food presented. Furthermore, one should take children’s interindividual differences into account because they influence how the knowledge gained through these programs may be generalized.

Implicit and explicit safety evaluation of foods: The importance of food processing

“…Infants display attenuated neophobic behaviors towards novel processed plant foods (e.g., unfamiliar fruits and vegetables cut into pieces) compared to novel unprocessed whole plants with fruits (Rioux & Wertz, 2021). Children assign negative properties (e.g., "This food makes you throw up") less often to processed foods compared to unprocessed foods (Foinant et al, 2021a). Taken together, this evidence suggests that adults, children, and even infants perceive processed foods differently than unprocessed foods, being able to infer that processed foods bear the markers of previous human interaction.…”

“…unprocessed foods (Coricelli et al, 2019a) and that children behaviorally assign negative properties less often to processed foods compared to unprocessed foods (Foinant et al, 2021a), but go further by suggesting that individuals represent differently the same food depending on its degree of processing. The finding that only individuals with higher BMIs associated more the cooked form of a food with safety was less expected.…”

“…A handful of studies revealed that, from an early age, individuals represent processed foods differently than unprocessed foods (Foroni & Rumiati, 2017;Aiello et al, 2018;Coricelli et al 2019aCoricelli et al , 2019bFoinant et al, 2021a;Rioux & Wertz, 2021),…”

“…The GNAT has been successfully used in several experiments (e.g., Ashford et al, 2018;Buhlmann et al, 2011), notably with food stimuli (Mas et al, 2020;Gerdan & Kurt, 2020;Spence & Townsend, 2007) and shows good psychometric qualities, such as internal consistency and reliability (Bar-Anan & Nosek, 2014, Williams & Kaufmann, 2012. Individual characteristics such as hunger level, food neophobia, dietary habits and BMI were measured because previous work has shown its influence on food evaluation (Coricelli et al, 2019a;Foinant et al, 2021a;Houben et al, 2010;Mas et al, 2020).…”

“…Adults completed the GNAT task and explicit ratings task on the same colored images depicting food differing only on their degree of processing: (i) unprocessed fruits and vegetables, (ii) the same foods cut into pieces and (iii) cooked into a puree. Our focus was on the processing action of cutting foods into pieces because previous work has shown it influences infants' neophobic behaviors (Rioux & Wertz, 2021) and children's generalization of negative properties (Foinant et al, 2021a;Lafraire et al, 2020). It is also a common component of many more complex food processing techniques and a clear cue of human intervention.…”