Development and modification of child food preferences and eating patterns: behavior genetics strategies

Behavioral genetics (BG) designs can offer useful strategies for studying the development of child food preferences and eating patterns. This review summarizes BG designs that tested familial influences on child eating behavior and implicated both genetic and home environmental factors. A range of BG strategies, including family and pseudo-family designs, classic twins designs, discordant sibling designs, cotwin control designs, and high-risk designs, have provided information on child development that could not have been obtained from the analysis of singletons. BG designs can provide can powerful tools for testing environmental theories of child nutrition and, potentially, for better understanding between-child variability in response to dietary interventions for overweight. The term BG may misleadingly imply only the classic twin design or just heritability estimation; BG strategies can be adapted creatively to address a range of questions concerning the development of child appetite and eating regulation.