Children's familiarity with snack foods changes expectations about fullness

Area of Science:

• Pediatric nutrition
• Food science
• Behavioral psychology

Background:

• Palatability significantly influences children's energy intake.
• Nonhedonic beliefs about food, particularly expected satiation, are understudied in children.
• Learned expectations about food properties impact adult meal size.

Purpose of the Study:

• To quantify children's expected satiation from energy-dense snack foods.
• To investigate the relationship between food familiarity and expected satiation in children.
• To determine if children use physical characteristics (perceived volume) to estimate satiation for unfamiliar foods.

Main Methods:

• Seventy 11- to 12-year-old children participated.
• A method of adjustment was used to measure expected satiation.
• Measures included expected satiation, perceived volume, familiarity, and liking for six snack foods.

Main Results:

• Food familiarity was positively correlated with expected satiation (r = 0.37, P = 0.002), even when controlling for liking.
• As food familiarity increased, the discrepancy between expected satiation and perceived volume judgments also increased.
• Children's judgments of expected satiation were more closely aligned with perceived volume for less familiar foods.

Conclusions:

• Children's beliefs about postingestive food effects are shaped by learning and consumption experience.
• Greater consumption of a food leads to higher expectations of its satiating capacity.
• In the absence of experience, children utilize simpler strategies, such as perceived volume, to predict satiation.