Picky eater – or just good taste?
Girls have a better sense of taste than boys but boys have a sweeter tooth. Every third child of school age prefers soft drinks that aren’t sweet. Children and young people love fish and do not think of themselves as being fussy eaters. Those are among the findings of a new European study looking at the ability of children and young people to taste and at what they like to eat.
In all, 8,900 children answered questions about their eating habits and how much they fussed over food, and took part in tests to assess their ability to recognize sweet and sour tastes at varying intensities, establish which sourness or sweetness they prefer and evaluate how many taste buds they had. It all adds up to the best evidence yet that children don’t automatically prefer sweet foods, and that parents – and food manufacturers – should be offering children a much wider variety of foods than they currently do.
Girls are better at recognizing tastes than boys
One of the many findings shows that girls are generally better at recognizing tastes than boys as well as being better at recognizing all concentrations of both sweet and sour tastes. The difference isn’t dramatic, but it’s quite clear – and backed up by prior research showing that women generally have a finer sense of taste than men.
But interestingly it’s not because girls have more taste buds because the study showed that boys and girls generally score equally here. Researchers say that boys and girls process taste differently, with boys needing an average of approximately 10% more sourness and approximately 20% more sweetness to recognize the taste.
They don’t all want candy…
Another sensational finding is that every third schoolchild would prefer non-sugary soft drinks. All the kids involved in the study did a blind test in which they were instructed to give scores to 10 different variants of the same soft drink, with different degrees of sweetness and sourness. Surprisingly, as many as 30% preferred the variant which contained no sugar at all or very little, suggesting that soft drinks for children don’t always have to contain a lot of sugar.
On the other hand, 48% of the pupils just couldn’t get enough, and gave top marks to the sweetest of the variants, possibly because they’ve simply gotten used to soda and candy.
Boys prefer stronger flavors…
The study suggested that girls generally prefer flavors that aren’t too strong. Boys, on the other hand, tend to like the more extreme flavors. Boys also have a sweeter tooth than girls – most of the boys preferred the super sweet soft drink variety. And most boys also gave top marks to the sourest samples.
They do like fish…
The study shows that when you ask the children about their likes and dislikes, they actually like fish. As many as 70% of the pupils said they like fish. And you can safely give them exciting foods, because as many as 59% of both boys and girls don’t consider themselves to be fussy eaters.