Essay On Food Neophobia

Psychological research is beginning to reveal the complex interplay of innate and environmental factors which shape eating patterns. Food preferences develops from genetically determined predisposition to like sweet and salty flavor and dislike bitter and sour taste. Food neophobia has been identified as an inherent adaptive personality trait (Milton1993).It is defined as the rejection of food that are novel or unknown to child. Food neophobia aids this avoidance mechanism through the child naturally rejecting potential food sources that they no experience . REASON TO STUDY – Every where in the world there are still gap between dietary recommendation and actual food use on the general population level , to improve the health status of individual , it is important to understand eating attitude and behavior, evidence also indicate that dietary habits acquired in childhood persist throughout the life. Development of healthy eating behavior is mostly depends upon environments and the …show more content…
during infancy we are nourished exclusively by milk and during this period food preferences are not an issue .Early in fancy is the time important in the development of predisposition to respond to new foods to influence food preferences and food intake. there are very few factors which explain the reduction of neophobic response, but it is very true that neophobic responses is reduced by repeated opportunity to consume e.g. when 2 year old were given varying number of opportunities to taste new fruits and cheese , their preferences increases with frequency of exposure, with the evidence it is observed that between 5-10 exposure to a new food are necessary to see and increase preference for