Abstract
The following three studies examined young children’s and adults’ recognition of the impact of healthy and unhealthy foods on height and weight. Study 1 examined the impact of foods on height and weight. Study 2 examined the role of foods on characters of different ethnicities. Study 3 controlled for participants’ prior knowledge about the impact of food by presenting fictitious alien characters. The results indicated that preschoolers recognized that healthy foods promoted an increase in height but only for African-American images. Adults recognized the impact of nutrition on both height and weight with a greater emphasis of nutrition for weight than height. These results demonstrate that preschoolers’ biological model is more sophisticated and differentiated than previously reported.
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Author Contributions
L.R.: designed the study, contributed to the data collection, analyzed the data and wrote the paper. J.C.: assisted with the data collection and preparation of the stimuli. L.H.: assisted with the data collection.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants are in accordance with the ethical standards of Oakland University and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Raman, L., Cosby, J. & Hodroj, L. How do Children Associate Food Type to Illustrated Height and Obesity?. J Child Fam Stud 27, 1940–1949 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-018-1025-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-018-1025-4