Developmental models of eating behaviours

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Have you ever stopped to think about how your behaviours and attitudes around food has been influenced from a young age by those around you?

Health psychology has many theories of eating behaviours that aim to understand just how much social and environmental experiences have an impact on how we eat today.

Let me briefly explain...

Exposure

Neophobia s a general unwillingness to eat new or novel foods and is especially prevalent in infants. It is thought to be an adaptive process supporting survival. The exposure hypothesis states that the more we are exposed to a new food, the more familiar it becomes and the more we like it. For example, Birch and Marlin (1982) gave young children novel foods over a 6 week period and found that it took 8-10 exposures before the decided that they liked it.

Associative learning

Food as rewards:

Classical conditioning may be responsible for certain foods becoming associated with certain occasions. For example, from a young age we learn to associate cake with celebrations. Likewise, telling children that they can have a treat after eating their vegetables makes them associate vegetables as a negative thing that they have to do to get something good. Thus, reducing their preference for the veg and increases preference for the reward food.

Parental control:

Some research has found that parents who have tight control over their children’s diets are more likely to make the kids develop a preference for restricted foods. This works the same when you are dieting and restrict foods, it just makes you want the forbidden fruit even more! However, other research focusing on type of control has found that convert control that is not detected by the child (like not bringing certain foods into the house) results in the children choosing less unhealthy snack foods.

Physical consequences:

Have you ever had food poisoning and after found yourself with an aversion to whatever it was that made you sick? This is a natural food consequence that your body has developed to protect itself. Interestingly, research has explored paring food cues with satiety and found that infants actually adjust their consumption of milk depending on the calorific density of the milk provided (Formon, 1974). Need more evidence that your body knows what it is doing when it comes to food consumption? Birch and Deysher (1986) found that pairing a specific flavour of milk with a specific calorie density made the infants adjust their consumption according to drink flavour.

The wisdom of the body:

Finding freedom from dieting and restrictive eating is becoming more popular. But so many are struggling to adopt the intuitive eating approach and give their body back control. So, I thought I would share some evidence as to why your body might know more than you give it credit for. Davis (1939) extensively studied the developmental aspects of eating behaviour. In one of her studies, she gave children free rain of what they wanted to eat over several months, and provided them with a variety of foods to chose from. Her findings showed that children are able to select and eat a diet consistent with growth and health. This generated the theory of ‘the wisdom of the body’ and emphasizes the body’s innate regulatory mechanisms to meet nutritional requirements.

Social learning  

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We learn about eating behaviour from watching others. As children we eat food prepared by our parents, and learn to eat the foods that they eat. 
However, our peers might play a more important role in our eating behaviours. Birch (1980) sat children next to other children who had different tastes in vegetables. After only a few days the children were starting to switch their veg eating to match those around them.

Media:

The media has a powerful influence over what we eat. For example, Boyland et al (2007) showed children episodes of Scooby Doo preceded by advertisements for products such as chocolate, sweets, savoury snacks and soft drinks.  After the cartoon children were offered a selection of five products to eat: chocolate buttons, sweets, crisps and Snack-a-Jacks. The consumption of snacks were recorded and compared to children shown non food related ads. After watching the snack advertisements total food consumption by normal weight children rose by 84% compared to the TV session with non food ads. Interestingly, the increase in the intake of food was not related to the brand that was featured in the advertising.

Education:

Unfortunately knowledge about nutrition does not equate to a good diet in practice. Part of this failure to act on advice could be down to mixed messages from science and misinterpretation and distortion by the press in their reporting of scientific advice.
For health information to be effective it needs to be seen as reliable and reputable. Information coming from sources perceived as unreliable or information that is confused or contradictory is likely to be ignored.  All too often health messages on food are mixed, such as the benefits of drinking red wine, the danger of eggs and the risks and benefits of meat consumption are all likely to leave the public confused and less trusting in nutritional advice.