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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Effet d'une éducation sensorielle sur les préférences et les comportements alimentaires d'enfants en classe de cours moyen (CM).

subject

description

Sensory experience of a meal (or mere exposure) can interact with preferences and food behaviour. On the other hand, current campaigns of nutritional information try to modify food behaviours by making people aware of the dangers of over eating and providing guidelines for healthy eating behaviour. Nevertheless, this approach doesn't take into account the pleasure to eat. The project "EduSens" bases itself on a hedonist and sensory approach in taste education that unites exposure to food and information about food. The aim of the study was to first develop tools to evaluate the effects of this sensory education and then to use them to measure the effects of a sensory education in a school context. The sensory education used is based on the pedagogical method of the "Classes du gout" developed by Jacques Puisais. It was carried out with school classes of children of 8 to 11 years old and with their usual teacher in Dijon, France. The study was performed using an experimental group of hundred children and a control group of the same size. Children of the experimental group participated in 12 lessons of 90 minutes of sensory education each. Both the experimental and the control group participated in three stages of measurement (each with three sessions in the laboratory): one stage before the education period of the experimental group (T0), one just after the education period (T1) and one about nine to ten months later (T2), in order to estimate the effect of the sensory education over a longer period. Results showed an increase of liking for more aromatic and intense food variants for both groups at T1 and this increase continued but only for the experimental group over the period till T2. Thus, the repetition of the measurement (or merely the exposure) seemed to have a positive effect on the measurements at T1, irrespective of influence of the sensory education, whereas the effect of sensory education seems to lie mainly in the consolidation and further growth of this effect. In addition, sensory education improved food neophilia temporarily but not until T2 and improved the description of food perception in the direction of the use of more objective and less subjective terms. This last effect proved to be lasting over time. Finally, the sensory education induced a switch in the strategy of classification of unknown odours towards a less hedonic approach. A new method to measure food choice has been tried out in this study, but did not show any effect of the sensory education on choice behaviour. To conclude, this sensory education showed some effects on food preferences and behaviour but not in a stable and lasting way, and influenced mainly the description of food perception,