Encouraging healthy eating in children through enjoyment of eating: examples from France

International audienceHealthy eating is important at all stages of life, and childhood is no exception. During early childhood, nutrition plays a critical role in development, in relation with growth and programming of organs functioning. During about two year after the start of complementary feeding, children are generally easy to feed and curious about foods. Later in childhood, after the end of the second year, food neophobia and/or pickiness may develop and children can become more difficult to feed. In particular, it has been observed in many contexts a reluctance to eat healthy foods, such as vegetables and fruits. If children had not yet acquired the habit of eating such foods, getting them to eat such foods becomes challenging and may create tension at the table. What are the options to encourage healthy eating in children? Providing nutrition information has proven useless at best and counterproductive in some instances. We postulate that promoting enjoyment of eating healthy foods is a more promising way. We describe three components of enjoyment of eating that can be used as lever to encourage eating: the sensory pleasure; the commensal pleasure and the cognitive pleasure. In other words, we propose that a food should be good to eat, good to share and good to think for this food to be accepted. We will show initiatives to trigger such aspects of enjoyment of eating developed in the French context