Show or tell: Children's learning about food from action vs verbal testimony

Childhood obesity continues to be a critical health concern in the United States. Nonetheless, interventions that focus on delivering verbal lessons about food and health to children in preschool classrooms have had only modest effects.

The present study examines the relative effectiveness of showing vs telling children about food to promote healthy eating, with a focus on unfamiliar foods and vegetables.

Three- to six-year-old children (n = 71) were tested in a laboratory study in which they watched videos of two people eating apple-broccoli puree. One person took five bites of the food; the other said they liked the food.

Children did not differentiate between the food they saw someone eat and the food they heard someone talk about. Children's food intake was negatively associated with parent reports of children's eating behavior on the Food Fussiness subscale of the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire. We found similar patterns in an analogous toy task. In an unfamiliar object task, children selected the action demonstration as the right way to use the object.

We find no evidence that action vs verbal testimony is more persuasive in guiding children's food choices, but action testimony may be persuasive in other domains. The associations between children's food intake and pickiness provide growing evidence of alignment between parent assessments of their children's typical eating behavior and children's food choices in laboratory studies.