Four key eating patterns in children condition emotional orientation to food, research cautions

20 Oct 2023 --- Four primary eating patterns have been identified for children — avid, happy, typical and fussy — by researchers from the Appetite team, with researchers from Aston University, Loughborough University, King’s College London and the University College London. The identified behaviors have been linked to how parents structure their eating patterns.

“Parents and caregivers can be left feeling frustrated when trying to manage their child’s food intake. By defining the four eating behavior profiles, this research project, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, will make it easier to identify the best feeding practices for each eating pattern and provide tailored, effective advice for parents,” says Dr. Abigail Pickard, School of Psychology, Aston University.

“Parents can use this research to help them understand what type of eating pattern their child presents. Then, based on the child’s eating profile, the parent can adapt their feeding strategies to the child.”

Most of the children in the study live in a dual-parent household, while 9.9% of the group come from a single-parent home. About half of parents work full-time and 54.1% of respondents were well educated.

What eating reveals about state of mindParental feeding practices structure children’s nutrition understanding and can be adapted to improve health.
The study sample mainly included respondents born in the UK (89%), with the remaining participants born in 53 different countries. The sample had 4.4% Asian participants, 3.2% Black and Black British, Caribbean, or African respondents, while 2.9% were of mixed descent or multiple ethnic groups, 88.4% were White and 0.6% identified as ‘other ethnic group.

One of the main findings of the study published in ScienceDirect found that approximately one in five young children demonstrated “avid eating,” including greater enjoyment of food, faster eating speed and weaker sensitivity to internal cues of fullness.

The analysis looked into children’s eating behaviors via 995 parents from England and Wales using the Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (CEBQ). According to the researchers, the behaviors distinguishing children with avid eating from those who demonstrated “happy eating” — about 17.7 % — is the desire to eat in response to the sight, smell or taste of palatable food and a higher level of emotional overeating. When combined, these eating behaviors can cause overeating and weight gain.

The CEBQ is designed to capture individual differences in eating styles and how that contributes to being underweight and overweight. It features seven eating behavior subscales and one drinking subscale.

“Children in the avid eating profile may benefit more from covert restriction of food, i.e., not bringing snacks into the home or not having foods on display, to reduce the temptation to eat foods in the absence of hunger,” Pickard explains.

“Whereas, if a child shows fussy eating behavior, it would be more beneficial for the child to have a balanced and varied selection of foods on show to promote trying foods without pressure to eat.”

Typical eaters comprised 44% of the study cohort, while fussy eaters comprised 16%. Children who demonstrate avid eating show more emotional eating and are more likely to eat when they notice food cues in their environment.

Professor Jackie Blissett, the project’s principal investigator, says that despite knowledge of the influence of feeding practices on children’s weight, current public health advice is generic and does not reflect variability in children’s appetites.Children’s eating patterns are very telling of their developmental progress.

“While feeding practices are key intervention targets to change children’s eating behavior and child weight outcomes, there has been little evaluation of how feeding practices interact with children’s food approach behaviors to predict eating behavior,” Blissett explains.

Temperament linked to eating
The research shows that parental feeding practices have a reciprocal role in the development of children’s eating behavior. These are feeding-specific behaviors used to influence a child’s eating behavior, such as food restriction, pressure to eat, modeling of food intake and lessons about nutrition.

The researchers demonstrated significant differences in children’s temperaments and their caregivers’ feeding practices based on the four identified eating patterns. Children who are avid eaters are more likely to be active and impulsive, with their caregivers prone to giving them food to regulate their emotions or restrict food for health reasons.

The study found that avid-eating children are less food secure than those exhibiting happy or typical eating behavior.

In the UK, roughly a fifth of children are overweight or living with obesity when they start their school career. The number rises to a third by the time they leave primary school. The study aimed to identify eating behavior patterns and their association with temperament, feeding practices and food insecurity to predict the children most at risk of becoming overweight.

Additional research will be conducted to investigate avid eating behavior. The findings will be integrated with current research. Researchers will collaborate with parents to develop feeding guidelines that help reduce children’s intake of palatable snacks.

By Inga de Jong

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