Practical workshop
Towards a better understanding of food preferences
On March 18, during the Taste-Nutrition-Health International Congress, Vincent Boggio chaired a pratical workshop entitled “The food preferences of children”, a topic that he has long been interested in. A lecturer in physiology at the University of Burgundy and doctor in pediatrics at the Dijon University Hospital, Vincent Boggio was indeed at the forefront of the “Gaffarel Study”, launched in 1982 and named after a crèche in Dijon. “Until then, my work was mostly on the nutritional aspect of diet. But progressively, I became interested in children’s food preferences.” It was in this context that Vincent Boggio launched the Gaffarel study with the aim of studing the food choices of children ages 2-3 years. Between 1982 and 1999, the children of this crèche were allowed to put together their own meals each day from a base of 8 food products. “We were able to show what the food preferences were of 418 2-3 year-old children,” he explains.
Nearly 20 years later, 341 former Gaffarel crèche “students”, aged 4 to 22 years old, were questioned in Dijon, at the FLAVIC laboratory of INRA and at the European Center for the Sciences of Taste, about their current preferences for the food products that were given that the crèche, on the variety of their diet and their degree of food neophobia. “This research showed that the food choices of two year-olds are a predictive variable of future food preferences. Of course, this weakens with age but the traces were still there, even when they had no memory of the food products they were offered,” he concludes. Since then, Vincent Boggio has taken part in two projects accredited by Vitagora, Edusens and Opaline. As the only medical doctor in the two project teams, he has in particular been in charge of recruiting children and mothers for the studies.
“The intuition of Pascal Schlich, director of the laboratory LIRIS at the European Center for the Sciences of Taste, was to see that there was all the expertise and experience we needed in Dijon to initiate the observatory of food preferences”, he insists. Opaline (Observatory of food preferences in new-borns and young children), is the first branch of this project. But this pediatrician also hopes to see the emergence of other branches emerge, focusing in older children, teenagers, even seniors, in order to “follow” food preferences throughout the lifetime. “Until now, we have neglected behavioral aspects, in particular for food preferences, when it comes to diet. We urgently need to take a closer look”, he insists.
Contact
Vincent Boggio
Email: vincent.boggio@chu-dijon.fr |
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