Preschool children's food preferences and consumption patterns

Abstract

To assess the relationship between stated preferences and consumption patterns for preschool children, measures of preference and consumption were obtained independently from 17 nursery school children during snack period on four consecutive days. Snacks were eight different kinds of small open-faced sandwiches. Children indicated their preferences by rank ordering the sandwiches from most to least preferred. The correlation between preference and consumption was considerably higher than the relationship reported in studies using adult subjects. Multidimensional scaling analysis of the preference data produced two salient dimensions in the children's preferences. The first dimension, familiarity, accounted for 51% of the variance in the data. The second dimension (23%) separated sandwiches with sweet spreads from those with nonsweet ones.