Altering the Sugar but Not the Sweet
How Dannon is doing a
disservice to our Kids!
Published on May 13, 2013
by Dina Rose, Ph.D. in
Flavor
diversity is dead. Have you heard? Sweet is the only flavor left. Especially if
you consider the foods we feed our kids.
I
concede to exaggerating just a little. You can still find salty out there too.
But real flavor diversity--sour!--is but a memory (unless you count
the Sour Patch Kids candy which pairs sour with sweet).
Dannon
has spent two years figuring out how to produce a yogurt with 25% less sugar
that consumers won't find less sweet.
How'd
they do it? By altering the natural acidity of yogurt. You see, it takes a
lot of sugar to mask the natural tart and acidic flavor of yogurt and
relatively little sugar to "enhance" blander tasting yogurt.
The
result is not what The New York Times reported this past weekend
as, "The Trek to a Yogurt Less Sweet."
Rather, it was a trek to a yogurt with less sugar. It's an important distinction.
If
you're thinking only about nutrition
it might make sense to count the grams of sugar in a product. But it's crazy if
you're thinking about habits.
• Kids don't eat
nutrition, they eat flavor. And flavor drives habits.
• Learning to like a
broad range of flavors is key to new food acceptance.
If
you want your kids to like broccoli, mushrooms...even apples, consider the
flavors you most frequently feed them. And then ask yourself if those flavors
are moving your kids' taste preferences towards or away from the kinds of foods
you'd really like them to eat.
Is
it really a win to feed kids yogurt that tastes really sugary-- even if
it has less sugar-- if it reinforces your kids' love of all things sweet? And
if most of those foods are nutritional losers?
It's
natural to think that kids come ready-wrapped with certain taste preferences,
and that parents
have to feed to those tastes. This is contrary to everything we know
about how food preferences are formed.
I'm
not saying that kids don't start out with a preference for sweet flavors. I'm
saying something more important:
American
children, by and large, have poor food preferences because we feed them a
steady stream of uniformly flavored foods that point our kids towards the taste
of junk and away from the taste of healthy foods. Changing the nutrition
profile of foods--as Dannon has done--without altering the flavors we feed,
won't fundamentally change how our children eat.
What's
next? Magically altering apples so they taste like Coke? Adding more science to
our food supply isn't the solution. Teaching kids to appreciate different kinds
of foods is.
Taste
preferences aren't set in stone. In fact, they're quite malleable. That's how
Indian kids end up eating Indian food, Mexican kids end up eating Mexican food
and American kids end up eating hot dogs. And all things sweet.
Submitted by Mr. Tom Lowe
