Changing w hat children eat C. Fergus Lowe

Introduction While there could be endless academic discussion revolving around the concept of 'food choice', most agencies concerned with the health of the nation are primarily interested in improving people's diets. This is hardly surprising given the ever-accumulating evidence that eating fruit and vegetables confers major health benefits, including lessening the risks of various forms of cancer and cardiovascular disease, and lowering overall mortality rates (see Gillman 1996; Key et al. 1996). The goal of helping people to change to healthy diets or, even better, of ensuring that they adopt healthy eating habits from childhood onwards, is also central to our research strategy. Such an enterprise requires an understanding of the psychological determinants of human food preferences set within the broader context of general psychological theory. Though this may in part entail studying what people say about their food choices or preferences (i.e. what might be called their 'attitudes' to food), it is critical to relate what they say to what they do: that is, to what they actually eat. And it is not sufficient merely to describe correlations between people's performance on attitude scales or questionnaires and their real or reported dietary intake: it is essential above all to establish the causal factors that bring about changes in people's food consumption. Only thus will we be able to effect significant changes in the eating habits of the general population. Experimental psychology has a central role to play in this endeavour.