Factors influencing attitudes to Food

Peter Kilcoyne

Opening Discussions

• Why is it important to understand eating behaviour?

• What foods do you like and why do you think you like them?

• Would you eat a pig, a dog, a frog, a snail or a horse or a cow? Who would? Who wouldn’t?

Factors influencing attitudes to Food

What factors affect what we eat, how much we eat and where we eat.• Learning and familiarity• Culture• Mood

Learning and Familiarity

• Behaviourist• Role of parents in shaping choices

Learning and Familiarity Exposure to Food

• Evidence - Birch and Marlin (1982) introduced 2 year old children to new foods over six weeks. One food was presented 20 times, one 10 times, one five times and one remained novel. They found a direct relationship between exposure and food preference. Specifically they found that 8-10 exposures were usually necessary before preferences began to shift significantly.

Learning and FamiliarityLearning through Rewards

• Operant conditioning. Children rewarded for eating food.

• e.g parents praising or eat your greens and have a sweet.

Learning and FamiliarityLearning through Rewards

• Evidence. Lepper et al (1982)• Pre school children were told a short story about either a little boy or a little girl

(depending on the child’s gender) who were given two new (imaginary) foods called Hoop and Hule. In the non contingent condition the participants were told that the mother in the story offered one of the foods first and then the other i.e. they were offered Hoop and then Hule.This was non contingent because the having one kind of food was not contingent on eating the other.

• In the contingent condition the mother in the story explained that the child could only have one of the foods if they ate the other i.e. “you can only have Hoop if you eat the Hule.”

• The children were later asked which foods they would rather eat. • The results demonstrated that there were no clear preferences in the non

contingent condition whereas in the contingent condition children preferred the food that had been used as a reward i.e. in the above example they preferred to have Hoop.

Learning and FamiliaritySocial Learning

• Learning food preferences through observing other people.

Learning and FamiliaritySocial Learning

• Evidence- Birch et al (1980) Used peer modelling to change children’s preference for vegetables. On four consecutive days, the children participating in the study were seated at lunch next to children who preferred a different vegetable to themselves. By the end of the study, the children showed a definite shift in their vegetable preference. This preference was still evident several weeks later. Those who initially did not like peas at the outset did like them by the end of the study.

Popeye and Spinach

Social Learning Theory• Duncker (1938): Children observed a series of role models

including older children, a friend, their mother, an unknown adult and a fictional hero making food choices different to their own. The findings showed that all the role models had an impact on the children’s subsequent food choices except the unknown adult. Therefore children are more likely to sample unfamiliar foods after they have seen a significant role model (particularly their mother rather than a stranger) eat the food. Parental attitudes and behaviour is therefore an essential part of the social learning process of food choice and eating behaviour. This supports the behaviourist Social Learning explanation of parental influence.

Learning and FamiliaritySocial Learning

• Evidence - Olivera et al (1992) reported a clear relationship between mother’s food intake for most nutrients and their pre-school children. They suggested that parents could be targeted to try to improve children’s diets.

Culture

• Impact of class, income, religion, ethics, ethnicity and geography on what we eat.

• In groups discuss and come back with one example of each of the above

Culture - Research

S Dindyal, S Dindyal. How Personal Factors, Including Culture And Ethnicity, Affect The Choices And Selection Of Food We Make. The Internet Journal of Third World Medicine. 2003 Volume 1 Number 2.

Culture - Research

• Newmark-Sztainer et al (2003) found that frequency of eating meals as a family was positively correlated with intake of fruit, vegetables, grains and calcium rich foods. This suggests that those cultures that normalise eating together have an important impact on the development of a child’s attitude towards healthy diets.

Culture - Research• Young and Nestle (2002) conducted a survey of take away

foods sold by chain restaurants. They found that portion sizes had increased substantially from those served in the past, in particular fries, burgers and drinks were two to five times larger than when the items were originally marketed. This has obviously led to an increase in calorie intake – as much as 97Kcal per burger! Many researchers have found that larger portions influence children’s eating behaviour by promoting their intake of food. Clearly therefore cultures that do not promote ‘oversizing’ may not choose to eat such large portions, whilst those cultures that do promote it may inadvertently increase portion size.

Culture - Research

• Leshem (2009) Compared the diets of ethnic communities living close to each other in Israel with equal access to shops and food. In the Muslim community intake of carbohydrates was twice that of the Christian community.

• These findings show that cultural influences on diet are profound and exist even when there is equal access to the same foods.

Mood

• How does Mood influence eating?Discussion – How does your Moodle affect what you eat?

Mood - research

• Stone and Brownell (1994) Recorded daily records of stress and eating patterns of 158 students for 84 days and reported that eating less was the predominant response to stress.

• Oliver and Ward (1999) Assessed student’s perceptions of the relationship between stress and snacking. 73% of respondents stated that stress increased their snacking and decreased their consumption of meals.

Mood - Research• Cools et al (1992): They discovered that stress only

triggered increased eating in people who were already dieting. This suggests that stress only seems to trigger eating in susceptible individuals.

• However, Conner et al (1999) studied the link between daily hassles and snacking in students who completed food diaries for a week. The results showed a link between snacking and stress, with no differences in relation to whether they were dieting. This goes against the individual differences model because their vulnerability did not make them eat more when stressed.

Mood - Research

• Wolff et al (2000) investigated differences between 20 female binge eaters and 20 female normal eaters focusing on daily, self-reported measures of mood, coping and eating behaviour over a three week period. It was found that the binge group reported more stress and negative moods but that their stress levels were similar on binge and non-binge days, whereas negative mood states were more apparent on binge days. This suggests that negative mood is more influential to our eating behaviour than stress.

Mood - Research• Stress and eating• Stress reduces food intake? Laboratory studies have

found that participants eat less when stressed (Willenbring et al, 1986), and this was also demonstrated with marines during combat situations (Popper et al, 1989).

• Stress increases food intake? A naturalistic study of stress at work concluded that periods of high workload were associated with greater intakes of energy, particularly saturated fats and sugar. (Wardle et al, 2000).