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However, children’s food preferences generally do not align with dietary recommendations: they typically rate energy-dense foods as the most liked and vegetables as the least liked foods.

Hedonic power driver#

Pleasure from eating is an innate driver of food consumption, and food likes and dislikes are strong predictors of children’s food choices.

Hedonic power how to#

Additional research is needed to understand the etiology of children’s attitudes toward food in order to provide insights on how to shape adequate children’s attitudes to guide them toward healthy food choices. These findings suggest that pleasure from eating might be an ally with regard to healthy eating among children. Hedonic-based attitudes toward food seem to drive healthier food choices in children compared with nutrition-based attitudes in this particular eating context. Conversely, children with both implicit and explicit nutrition-based attitudes chose less healthy foods. We observed that children with more hedonic-based implicit or explicit attitudes toward food were more likely to choose healthy food options from the buffet. Resultsīoth implicit and explicit attitudes significantly influenced children’s food choices. Explicit attitudes were assessed with a task in which children placed each of 48 food items into one of the following categories: “yummy”, “yucky” (i.e., hedonic categories), “makes you strong”, or “makes you fat” (i.e., nutritional categories). For each triplet, foods could be paired according to their hedonic or nutritional characteristics. Moreover, their implicit attitudes were assessed with a pairing task in which children were presented with 10 food triplets and asked to choose two food items that “best go together”. The children were asked to choose five food items from a buffet featuring five healthy and five unhealthy sweet foods pretested as being highly liked. MethodsĪ total of 63 children (age range = 6.3–11.5) participated in a 90-min session at 5 pm (i.e., afterschool snack time in France). The present study investigated whether hedonic- versus nutrition-based implicit and/or explicit attitudes toward food predicts children’s healthy versus unhealthy food choices. In the food domain, the affective component pertains to the hedonic tone of consumption, while the cognitive component encompasses nutritional value or health consequences of food. Yet, the affective and cognitive components of attitudes toward food can lead to distinct predisposition toward a food item and potentially to different food choices. Implicit and explicit attitudes are potential precursors of food choices and combine affective and cognitive components that can vary in their relative dominance.