Food psychology: how to love hated foods

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Make the unusual habitual, and it will be easier to fix the eating habit.

Until 2-3 years old, children eat almost everything. My son enjoyed eating broccoli puree without salt or other additives. Now, at the word "cabbage", hysteria begins. As a child, I hated liver, and my girlfriend didn’t eat tomatoes. Why this happens can be answered by the psychology of food.

All people have a list of foods that they didn’t like as children and that they enjoy now. But I'm still sick of the liver smell, and some of my friends don't understand how you can eat prunes. Most often, the problem is not in the stomach, but in the head.

How to make friends with unloved foods? Psychologist Elizabeth Phillips is studying food psychology. She talks about how to cope with food rejection, which we can not tolerate since childhood.

Why do we love or hate food

People shape their menu under the influence of innate and learned preferences. In the first case, the brain of each person makes decisions according to the same laws. And in the second, the secret lies in childhood.

Inborn preferences

It turns out that our innate taste preferences play an insignificant role in the choice of dishes. From birth, we are programmed to crave sweets and to give up sour and bitter.

Addictions can be explained in terms of evolution. Sweet foods are a good source of nutrients, so we tend to choose them. For example, ripe fruits are most often safe and rich in vitamins. While poisonous plants are almost always bitter, we genetically reject this taste. This partly explains why some people dislike vegetables so much.

Infants from the first days show an attitude towards sweet and bitter, and their reaction to salty develops a little later.

Phillips thinks our cravings for sodium chloride can be easily attributed to adaptation. The water of salt lakes contains many trace elements necessary for the body.

We also love fatty foods: they provide a significant amount of calories. Therefore, people love a combination of fatty and sweet (ice cream) or fatty and salty (fried potatoes).

Learned preferences

Congenital factors adjust eating behavior, but learned preferences are the main influence. They are formed even before our birth.

We receive our first lessons about taste while in the womb. The child absorbs knowledge from the mother through the umbilical cord and amniotic fluid. Scientists have shown to Human fetuses learn odors from their pregnant mother’s diet that children express less negative reactions to the smells of anise and garlic if pregnant women consume these foods. The same goes for carrots. Babies loved the taste if their mothers drank carrot juice during gestation and breastfeeding.

You already know that taste preferences are formed within two years. First, you eat whatever the adults give, and then you become neophobic. Now you don't like new food. So, if your mom didn't like garlic, onions or liver, the chances of enjoying them are close to zero.

This is where many parents make the biggest mistake. They believe that the child simply does not like this kind of food. But kids don't like new foods at all. If you give up trying to feed your offspring with these foods, some of them will hate them already in adulthood. Parents simply do not know that if they continue to treat their child to boiled vegetables, over time they will like them.

The solution to the problem is to make this food habitual. Try again and again. This can take 10 to 15 tries. So if you don't like a dish, include it on the menu more often.

We don't just eat foods because we love them. Vice versa. We love them because we constantly eat.

But switching to a new diet is not as easy as it seems. This should be done within 2-4 months. If you are used to drinking fatty milk, 10 glasses of skim milk will obviously not be enough to generate warm feelings. Your body needs time to rebuild its taste buds.

How to accustom yourself to unloved foods

It would seem that since most of our preferences are learned, then it is enough to adjust your diet and just force yourself to addicted to new food. But there are many interesting nuances in the psychology of taste that are worth knowing.

For example, there are people who are hypersensitive to bitterness, which is why they try to avoid green vegetables.

Also, do not forget that the senses play an important role in taste preferences. The smell of food affects us greatly, but we also evaluate the dish by its appearance. If you change it, the taste will be perceived differently.

Remember how long you can't even look at what you recently poisoned with. It's all in the head: a kind of program has been developed in order to protect us from poisonous food.

Remember: if you want to change your attitude towards certain products, you need to prepare psychologically and accustom yourself to new things gradually.

If you have children, try to diversify their menu as much as possible. They have to try new things. And even if they do not like something, perhaps for the twentieth time they will say that now this is their favorite dish.

Developing taste buds and getting used to different foods is not only good for the body. This will come in handy when traveling. For example, Asian cuisine is characterized by tastes, colors, and smells unusual for a European. It's more interesting to try something new than to frantically search for the nearest McDonald's.