Have You Ever Heard Of Food Neophobia?
Food neophobia is when a child is afraid or refuses to eat new foods. This behavior is characteristic of a certain stage in the development of children.
Sharing a meal with family or friends is great. In many cultures, it is also the basis of most holidays and celebrations. It’s an excellent experience…unless one of the family members has food neophobia. If this is the case, meals often become exhausting and chaotic and require constant negotiation.
Eating seems like a very simple process. We simply put food in our mouth, chew it, and swallow it. However, it is not always that simple. Eating is an incredibly complex process that can be a real challenge for many people. It requires the cooperation and coordination of many systems.
What Causes Food Neophobia?
This reluctance to try new foods is characteristic of all omnivorous species, including humans. It is an innate response to protect us from potential environmental hazards.
Many foods from our natural environment can be toxic. When confronted with new foods, our natural response is therefore caution.
If possible, we would prefer to avoid new foods and stick to the foods we are familiar with. We often consider foods to be safe only after trying them a few times.
Another possible cause is still having to learn from the taste. People can taste four basic tastes: salty, bitter, sour and sweet. Babies often have an innate preference for sweet and salty flavors. Children generally tend to have more sweet tastes than adults.
The learning of tastes actually starts before birth. Babies therefore often have a preference for flavors consumed by their mothers during pregnancy.
Just like during pregnancy, babies also discover new flavors while being breastfed. Some flavors pass through breast milk. The exposure to tastes at this stage of life therefore forms part of a baby’s first taste.
What are the characteristics of food neophobia?
Food neophobia mainly appears during two critical stages: when a baby is between four and eight months old and when he is between fifteen and thirty-six months old.
In the first stage, the mother-child bond helps to prevent food neophobia because the child feels protected. The most problematic stage is when a baby turns 15 months old.
One of the hallmarks of food neophobia is that children think that new foods will have an unpleasant taste. So if you want your child to try new foods, it’s important to create new experiences.
In this case, imitation usually produces good results. For example, if your child can see that you are actually enjoying a particular food, he’s more likely to be willing to try it himself. This reluctance to try new foods is more common when it comes to:
- Foods of animal origin versus foods of non-animal origin.
- Raw vs cooked food.
- Sour or bitter flavors versus sweet flavors.
How can you best deal with this problem?
Studies show that parental attitudes towards child behavior greatly influence the development of children’s food preferences.
In order for children to develop healthy eating habits, we must keep in mind that parents have prejudices about any of the foods they offer their children.
For example, if parents are strict about tasty food, it often causes children to crave it more. A lax attitude to certain foods usually has the opposite effect.
Pleasant situations in which a child tastes new things together with their parents will make the child more likely to develop positive associations with this food.
The same applies vice versa. All of this shows how important parental response to their children’s eating habits is when it comes to developing healthy food preferences.
Food neophobia usually subsides when the child reaches the age of five or six years. However, parents should be patient with their children so that they can calmly overcome their food neophobia and adopt healthy eating habits.
