Childhood Obesity - Do you have an overweight child? We offer tips to help your child lose weight and get fit!

A major study of 8,900 Danish schoolchildren produced interesting results regarding how children taste food.

Girls have a better sense of taste than boys do, although they have the same number of taste buds. Boys needed 10% more sourness and 20% more sweetness than girls did in order to recognize certain flavors. Perhaps not surprisingly, boys prefer extreme flavors. They gave highest approval to the sweetest sodas and the sourest foods.

One in three children does not like sweet foods or drinks. However, 48% of the children gave their highest marks to sweets.

The ability to taste improves gradually as a child gets older. By age 13 or 14, most children prefer sweets less often.

The Danish Science Communication and the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Copenhagen cooperated to perform this study.

Labels: junk food, sweets, tastes

Posted By: Aspen Education Group 0 Comments

Do you ever wonder why sugary, unhealthy snack foods and cereals marketed to children come in such wild colors, like bright blue, purple, green and red? It may be because what we see affects how we believe something tastes.

A recent study reported in the Journal of Consumer Research found that people identified a difference in taste - even when none existed - when the color of a beverage was changed. Using Tropicana orange juice, researchers asked participants to describe the taste difference between two cups of the beverage, which were identical except that one was colored a brighter orange with food coloring. The overwhelming majority identified the brighter orange juice as tasting sweeter.

Yet when two glasses of orange juice were presented with no color change between them but with one glass sweetened with sugar, the majority of study participants were unable to discern a difference in taste.

Labels: nutrition, research, tastes

Posted By: Aspen Education Group 0 Comments