Random Stuff XXXIX

[6_bleen_7]

It's been over a month since I last posted an entry, mostly on account of a secret research project I've been doing in my spare time. (I may get a primary-author book chapter out of it, so I'm quite motivated to complete the project, which has at least another six weeks to go before the deadline for contrubutions.) In the meantime, I've slowly

Comments

[ruthling]

There were a lot of interesting blog posts about the fussy eating article, many poking holes in the method, and the conclusions. Sure, taste preferences (and things like being a supertaster or having a food intolerance that makes one feel sick) are genetic but people with actual experience feeding kids (their own and others) and pretty convinced and convincing that a lot of picky eating is a control or habit issue. I see a lot of my parent friends giving up on getting their kids to eat more variously and it makes me a little sad and frustrated. Do you remember why you were picky as a kid?

We call "Au Bon Pain" "ow! Bone Pain!" I find the food disappointing, and kind of gross.

As for 100 bottles of beer in binary, that's full of win!

[6_bleen_7]

Yes-and taste aversions can also be environmental (I love the term "sauce bérnaise syndrome"), for good reasons. I can remember the source of two very specific ones of my own-pumpkin pie and raisins fresh out of the box-and both trace back to a specific instance of getting horribly sick shortly after a meal. Interestingly, I can enjoy raisins in just about any context-in bread, in oatmeal, etc.-just not all by themselves.

I don't know why I was so fussy when I was little. Oddly enough, it wasn't a problem with exotic foods or anything. I happily chowed down Chinese and Mexican food, for example. It was mostly a problem with lunch: nothing at that time of day ever seemed good. By college I'd evidently grown out of it, as at Oberlin I typically ate a 2,000-kcal lunch and then slept through my afternoon classes. (It should be noted that we had a pretty good food-service program.)

[margareta87]

I have the article you seek, but it's a PDF. How would you like it delivered?

I've never been a picky eater, but all my cousins are (when I was 4, my uncle watched in amazement as I polished off an entire bucket of steamed clams, which I'd never tasted until then). Based on lots of anecdotal evidence from her friends and family, my mom is convinced that picky eating is tied to bottle feeding. The idea being that if a baby is breast fed, it is continually exposed to new flavors through their mother's diet, but formula-fed kids taste the same thing, throughout the day, every day. So when graduating to solid foods, the breast-fed child have a more adventurous palate. It's an interesting hypothesis, and I wonder if anyone's ever taken a look at it. Something like this could look like heritability (if breast feeding is culturally "heritable," either down family lines or at least among children of the same mother).

[6_bleen_7]

Thanks-please send it to 6_bleen_7 (at) livejournal (dot) com. I've had problems receiving mail in the past, but I just found out that Hotmail is blocking e-mail I receive using that address as a proxy; but I just changed it to a different address, so I should be able to receive mail again.

Do you remember, offhand, where any of the critiques may be found? I suspect that flaws exist in the methodology, but from the abstract alone I can't say what they might be.

The breast-feeding connection should be easy to test by comparing fussy eating rates between breast-fed and bottle-fed children. Whether breast feeding affects the heritability of fussy eating can also be examined, by comparing the trait correlations among different pairs of relatives-mother-offspring, father-offspring, and sibling-sibling. Breast feeding would show up as a "maternal effect" (but would only be distinguishable from other maternal effects, such as in utero environment, by comparing breast-feeding and bottle-feeding families).

[6_bleen_7]

Thanks! The authors did a pretty simplistic analysis; I don't see how they could estimate shared environmental variance by their method, but they used an approach with which I'm not familiar.

[6_bleen_7]

On second look, it appears they used the simplest possible model, described quite well in Wikipedia. I forgot to mention the potential confounding factor of trait correlation between parents ("assortative mating"). It may not play too strong a role in fussy eating, but you can imagine profound an effect spousal correlation has on traits such as dyslexia. Book lovers and haters do not usually make good couples, as I'm sure you're aware.

[jedibl]

My mother claims that until I was 4, I would eat anything, but after that I abruptly stopped. For me it was also not until I was in college that I started eating pretty much anything again (although I still won't touch mushrooms if I can avoid them.)

I specifically remember the day that I stopped eating lettuce. My mother offered me a piece of lettuce to eat (as she often did while preparing salad for dinner). I started to eat it, then decided that I didn't want to eat it anymore because it was too flat.

To be fair, I have no idea how much of this memory is real, and how much is pure invention. My mother does not remember this particular incident.

[6_bleen_7]

I made a similar shift around the time we moved from Seattle to Salt Lake City, when I was six. I remember that I gave up most kinds of seafood, especially crab, though I can't come up with any particular reason why these foods suddenly became unpalatable. (It may have to do with the relative quality of Seattle vs. Salt Lake City seafood.)

Heh-heh-rejecting foods based on the way they look is generally an adaptive response, though I have no idea why flatness would inherently imply toxicity. There's no accounting for childhood logic.

[6_bleen_7]

There is definitely a widespread distaste for unusual foods, even in adults. Think of how few people brought up on American food are fond of, say, Ethiopian or Korean food. In the same vein, I've heard reports that in some Asian cultures, cheese is regarded with the same distaste as spoiled milk (which it is, to a first approximation). And with children the culinary xenophobia is, on average, considerably stronger. (I would not have touched Vietnamese or Korean food, or perhaps even Indian food, before I went to college). How much of this general trend is inherited and how much is environmental I couldn't say. You and jedibl raise an intriguing point about growing more open-minded about foods (and other things) at about college age. In the case of dress and music and other cultural tastes, we definitely go through an ultra-conformist stage in adolescence wherein we desperately struggle to find our identity. How much of this is cultural, I couldn't guess, but I'll bet it is at least partially a function of our society. With food,

[6_bleen_7]

That's a good one, but I tend to agree with him on that one. If I'd done a encore performance, I'd've sung "The Old Dope Peddler," which has a far simpler melody and accompaniment (I could possibly have accompanied myself). That, or "Lobachevsky."