Abstract
Establishing healthy dietary habits in childhood is crucial in preventing long-term repercussions, as a lack of dietary variety in childhood leads to enduring impacts on both physical and cognitive health. Poor conceptual knowledge about food has recently been shown to be a driving factor of food rejection. The majority of studies that have investigated the development of food knowledge along with food rejection have mainly focused on one subtype of conceptual knowledge about food, namely taxonomic categories (e.g., vegetables or meat). However, taxonomic categorization is not the only way to understand the food domain. We also heavily rely on other conceptual structures, namely thematic associations, in which objects are grouped because they share spatial-temporal properties or exhibit a complementary relationship (e.g., soft-boiled egg and soldiers). We rely on such thematic associations between food items, which may not fall into the same taxon, to determine the acceptability of food combinations. However, the development of children's ability to master these relations has not been systematically investigated, nor alongside the phenomenon of food rejection. The present research aims to fill this gap by investigating (i) the development of conceptual food knowledge (both taxonomic and thematic) and (ii) the putative relationship between children's food rejection (as measured by the Child Food Rejection Scale) and both thematic and taxonomic food knowledge. A proportional (A:B::C:?) analogy task, with a choice between taxonomic (i.e., bread and pasta) and thematic (i.e., bread and butter) food associates, was conducted on children between 3 and 7-years-old (n = 85). The children were systematically presented with either a thematic or taxonomic food base pair (A:B) and then asked to extend the example type of relation to select the respective thematic or taxonomic match to the target (C:?). Our results revealed, for the first time, that increased levels of food rejection were significantly predictive of poorer food identification and decreased thematic understanding. These findings entitle us to hypothesize that knowledge-based food education programs to foster dietary variety in young children, should not only aim to improve taxonomic understanding of food, but also thematic relations.
Highlights
A lack of dietary variety in childhood leads to enduring impacts on both physical and cognitive health (Evans et al, 2018)
To examine our two leading hypotheses, we developed a proportional analogy task of the type A is to B, what C is to D (D having to be discovered), to compare the development of young children’s capabilities to make taxonomic and thematic associations within the food domain
Age was found to be positively related to food identification ability, which was a significant predictor of improved thematic categorization performance
Summary
A lack of dietary variety in childhood leads to enduring impacts on both physical and cognitive health (Evans et al, 2018). On the other hand, is the rejection of both familiar or unfamiliar foods and textures (Dovey et al, 2008; Lafraire et al, 2016). Both food pickiness and food neophobia account for inadequate food consumption and nutrient deficiencies in young children (Dovey et al, 2008; Lafraire et al, 2016; Rioux et al, 2017b). It is fundamental to identify the key driving mechanisms of food rejection in young children to tackle poor eating habits and behaviors (World Health Organization, 2014)
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