Pleasure or Health:

Do children have to choose?

Pleasure from eating is known to be a strong predictor of children’s food choices. Yet, children’s food preferences generally do not align with dietary recommendations, children rate energy-dense foods as the most liked and vegetables the least liked. In order to incite children to adopt a healthy diet, parents, caregivers, and national campaigns put forward nutritional arguments. However, there is limited research regarding the impact of the level of nutritional concern on children’s food choices, especially compared to pleasure-oriented goals. This talk is an overview of the research work I have conducted during my PhD, and explores the relationships between children’s hedonic- versus nutrition-based attitudes towards food, pleasure- versus health-oriented eating contexts and children’s food choices.

** Lucile Marty is a PhD student at the Center on Taste and Feeding Behavior in Dijon, France.