Exploring disgust

As adults, we often interpret children’s refusal to eat or try a certain food as bad behaviour. We think they should eat it because (delete as applicable) we’ve cooked it / we’ve paid for it / it’s good for them / we hate waste. They don’t want to eat it because… well, the ‘why’ of food rejection can be hard to get to for parents. It’s different for each child and even different for the same child in different situations. If eating a pea is nothing to us, it can be very hard to imagine why it could be such a huge deal for a child.

This is where empathy comes in. I – and many other feeding professionals – often try to help parents understand avoidant eating by using analogies. I ask parents to imagine sitting down to dinner at a friend’s house and being offered a huge portion of tripe (cow stomach beloved by the British in the 1950s). For most people, this would give rise to a disgust reaction; a very physical, visceral response to a food that every fibre of your being does not consider good or safe to eat, often associated with contamination. Deep down we think: “This will make me sick!”

I love this video from pediatric occupational therapist, Marsha Dunn Klein of Mealtime Notions, describing the experience of being served grasshoppers. Marsha’s hesitation about a new food that most of us would find intimidating helps us walk in the shoes of a food-anxious child. Marsha also shares some great insights about how to tackle new foods and the video is well worth a watch.

 

In this article I wanted to go deeper into disgust – to look at what the research says and what we can take from this as parents.

 

Disgust has been recognised as an emotion since the time of Darwin¹, but has not been widely researched in relation to eating².  Like anxiety, disgust can be a very helpful emotion, keeping us safe and helping us decide how to react to our environment. Also like anxiety, if we respond with a high level of disgust to something which is actually not dangerous, this can be unhelpful.

A recent study exploring disgust sensitivity had some interesting findings. It looked at adults so we need to be cautious applying the conclusions of this research to children, but I think these insights are useful, nonetheless:

• People with more disgust sensitivity are more likely to be a ‘picky eaters’ than people with low disgust sensitivity
• People with more disgust sensitivity are less likely to eat a varied diet
• Disgust has been associated with digestive issues or discomfort in relation to eating certain foods
• People with high disgust sensitivity are more likely to reject foods with particular textures (chewy, slippery or creamy)
• People with high disgust sensitivity eat less of certain food categories than people with low disgust sensitivity (vegetables, eggs, seafood and some meats)

(Egolf, Siegrist and Hartmann, 2018)

Researchers exploring children’s eating behaviour have speculated that there could be a link between anxiety, sensory processing and disgust. They suggested that the thoughts and physical feelings we have when we are anxious – like nausea and being on ‘high alert’ – may increase sensory sensitivity and predict a disgust reaction to food³.

It has been argued that children under the age of four or even seven, cannot have a disgust reaction to food because they won’t yet have the adult concept of contagion  (the idea that something is potentially hazardous to health and can ‘infect’ a person⁴). However, in the same paper, the authors point to a disgust reaction driven by the bitter taste of some foods (sparking an ancient negative reflex in the taster based on many bitter leaves and berries being poisonous). It is my sense that many things can elicit disgust, often in a subconscious way.

 

As parents what should we take from this?

 

Disgust is real

When children are horrified at the thought of eating something, for them it could be literally disgusting.

 

Disgust is subjective

What is delicious to me can be disgusting to you.

 

Teach by example

The more children see us eating foods they are not comfortable with, the more they are in a position to reframe them as ‘okay to eat’.

 

Respect children’s reactions

There are so many reasons for certain foods being tricky for some children. High disgust sensitivity is only one of them. Children’s responses to food need to be respected even if they may feel very hard to relate to.

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¹ Rozin, P., & Fallon, A. (1987). A perspective on disgust. Psychological review, 94(1), 23.

² Egolf, A., Siegrist, M. & Hartmann, C. (2018)  How people’s food disgust sensitivity shapes their eating and food behaviour. Appetite,127, 28-36

³ Farrow, C., & Coulthard, H. (2012). Relationships between sensory sensitivity, anxiety and selective eating in children. Appetite, 58(3), 842-846.

⁴ Lafraire, J., Rioux, C., Giboreau, A., & Picard, D. (2016). Food rejections in children: Cognitive and social/environmental factors involved in food neophobia and picky/fussy eating behavior. Appetite, 96, 347-357.