Bayside Dietetics
By Sarah Smith of Bayside Dietetics
www.baysidedietetics.com.au
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Two minutes and 32 seconds into a Man vs. Wild show, Bear Grylls uses his teeth to rip the head off some maggots he’s found inside a dead animal. He spits out the head and consumes the body. Why? The head doesn’t taste as good. I know you were thinking “why” was he eating any part of the maggot at all, but what’s interesting is that Bear’s tastebuds guided him to accept part of the maggot, but deemed another part too disgusting.
Just two years ago, a woman and her three children became lost in Peru without food. They moved around tasting different plants, seeds and berries. They rejected bitter plants, but accepted sweet plants and berries. They survived and were found after 34 days.
In both “survival” situations, taste was a critical factor in determining whether the individual ate the food they found, or spat it out. How did the family, lost by accident, have the same survival instinct around food as the adventurer Bear Grylls?
A lot comes back to the way we have evolved as humans to have a preference for sweet foods as a basic survival instinct. Millions of years ago, getting enough to eat was not the same as the pop up to the local shops it is now. Searching for food took energy, so the trick was to find something that provided more energy than it took to find it. Sweet food is typically higher in energy than other food-types, so all plant-eating animals began to develop a preference for sweet things. Fast forward to today, and our preference as humans for sweet things is an instinct.
Just as strong, is our instinct to reject bitter foods. Back in evolution, bitter foods were often toxic, and we learned to spit them out to protect ourselves from a potentially lethal food.
Does this help explain your child’s tendency to spit out broccoli while happily accepting fruit? Broccoli is more bitter while fruit is perceived as sweet.
The story doesn’t end there however. Recent research is indicating our bias is an important layer on whether we will reject or accept a food. In her famous TED talk, viewed almost 4 million times, Camilla Anderson, describes blindfolding her husband and asking him to choose his preferred coffee. He believes he is comparing his usual expensive brew with an alternative cheaper option and confidently tells her, the sweet first brew is much more preferrable to the bitter and foul-tasting second brew. Little does he know, but she has offered him the same cup of coffee twice. His bias to believe that an expensive coffee will taste better than a cheaper one, influenced how he experienced the coffee.
How can we use all this information to help our children accept foods like broccoli alongside fruit?!
The first thing to remember is that there is biology playing a big role. While all humans prefer sweet to bitter, this preference is strongest in children who need more energy to grow. Children have three times as many tastebuds as adults, and experience flavours more intensely. They are more sensitive to sweet and bitter than adults, and hence more likely to reject the bitter.
The change of the tastebuds through childhood is also relevant. The way we experience each different flavour: salt, sweet, bitter, sour and umami, develops at different rates. For example, our preference for salt is at its peak at two years of age. It’s not unusual for despairing parents to come and tell me that their two-year old, who used to love home-made food, now wants everything from a packet. Packet food typically has higher salt content, and their two-year-old is strongly driven to seek this flavour.
In addition to this, we may start pairing flavours with experiences and this develops a bias as we get older. Children who are nagged to eat their vegetables, will start to associate the bitter flavour of vegetables with parental nagging, and quite different to the fun atmosphere where sweet and salty foods are shared. By the time children are less attune to bitter and biologically accept vegetable flavours, a negative bias against vegetables might be so strong that they continue to reject vegetables.
Finally, the smell, texture and look of food are all integrated into your child’s experience of food, alongside taste. It is possible to reject a food simply based on the smell or appearance of a food. An American study gave twins two of exactly the same meal, one wrapped in plain packaging, and the other wrapped in the wrapper of a popular fast-food chain. With consistency, the twins reported a preference for the food wrapped by the fast-food chain.
I’ll leave the final word to history. A 1941 report by the Committee of Food Habits wrote that while there is some degree of taste involved, whether a child will eat a food or not, has a lot to do with society’s influence. They write “Factors involved in getting children to eat include watchful neglect, pleasing atmosphere, social conversation, small portions, paired liked-disliked foods, matter of fact attitude to refusals and good adult example.”
