Predictors and consequences of food neophobia and pickiness in young girls
Section snippets
Participants
Newspaper advertisements, flyers, and letters of invitation were used to recruit prospective families in a 5-county radius of central Pennsylvania. Participating families were exclusively non-Hispanic white. We collected data from 192 young girls and their parents concerning early experience, nutrition, and a range of developmental issues when the girls were on average 7.3±0.3 years old. We obtained written parental consent from parents for themselves and their daughter and the study protocol
Statistical analysis
We used complete data from 191 families and analyzed the descriptive statistics for all variables of interest. Data from two families were dropped because the girls' data included outliers in two of the bivariate distributions. Data for three measurements-pickiness, no time to eat healthy, and breastfeeding-had skewed distributions that were unaffected by transformation. To address this problem, we dichotomized the skewed variables using a median split for all subsequent analyses, and
Descriptive measures of variables of interest
Table 1 provides descriptive information from our sample.Total vegetable consumption in girls was well below the 3 servings per day suggested by the USDA dietary guidelines (28), and below the 2.2 servings a day that Krebs-Smith et al (29) reported being consumed by this age group. As shown in Table 1, when we excluded potatoes in the form of french fries and potato chips, vegetable consumption dropped even further below these figures. Mothers' total vegetable consumption (including french
Discussion
These findings indicate that girls with neophobia and pickiness ate fewer servings of vegetables, compared with girls with neither food neophobia nor pickiness. Although they were modestly correlated, results from the regression analyses revealed that food neophobia and pickiness are distinct behavioral concepts with different predictors. Food neophobia in girls was predicted by traitlike variables: their mothers' own high food neophobia scores and their own comparatively high levels of
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