Increasing pre-school children’s liking for a novel vegetable. A comparison of flavour flavour learning and repeated exposure

Abstract

Most UK children do not consume the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, with intake of vegetables particularly low. Many children dislike vegetables and so strategies have been used to improve liking for vegetables in children to promote intake. The current study examined the effectiveness of flavour flavour learning and repeated exposure to increase intake of vegetables in pre-school children. Children aged 12–60 months ( N = 33) were recruited through nurseries and given 8 exposures to a root vegetable puree with added apple puree (FFL) and another root vegetable puree with nothing added (RE) on separate days over 5 weeks. A third root vegetable puree acted as a control. Intake of unadulterated forms of all three purees was measured on separate days pre and post intervention. Intake was also measured after each exposure. Preliminary analysis of data ( N = 22) demonstrates a significant trend of increased intake of vegetable purees post intervention in all three conditions ( p = .001) with no significant effect of condition on magnitude of change. No effect of condition was found on intake across exposures while results suggest a significant effect of number of exposures. A significant time x age group interaction revealed greater intake of vegetable puree by younger (12–24 m) children overall post-intervention. Results suggest that flavour flavour learning confers no added benefit to simple repeated exposure in increasing vegetable intake in pre-school children and that effects can generalize to other similar foods. Simple strategies to improve liking by adding apple sauce seem unnecessary, and familiarity through repeated exposure is sufficient to increase acceptance.