For most of us, eat to live is certainly true. But there may be times when our enjoyment of food is more important to us than the nourishment we get from it.
Factors such as age, gender, genetic makeup, occupation, lifestyle, family, and cultural background affect our daily food choices.
We use food to project a desired image, forge relationships, express friendship, show creativity and display our feelings.
We cope with anxiety or stress by eating or not eating we reward ourselves with food for a good grade or a job well done; or in extreme cases, we punish failures by denying ourselves the benefit and comfort of eating.
Food preferences begin early in life and then change as we interact with parents, friends and peers. Further experiences with different people, places and situations often – but not always – cause us to expand or change our preferences.
Taste and texture are the most important things that influence our food choices; next are cost and convenience. What we eat reveals much about who we are.
Age is a factor in food preferences. Young children prefer sweet or familiar foods, babies and toddlers are generally willing to try new things.
Experimental evidence suggests infants exposed to a variety of flavors are even more likely to accept novel foods.
Preschool typically go through a period of food neophobia (a dislike for anything new or unfamiliar); school age children tend to accept a wider array of foods and teenagers are strongly influenced by the references and habits of their peers.
If we track the kinds of food we eaten in the past year, we might be surprised to discover how few basic dies are in the diet.
By the time we reach adulthood, we have formed a core group of foods we prefer.
Of this group, only 100 basic items account for 75 percent of our food intake.
Like many aspects of human behaviorism food choices are influenced by both inborn (biological) and environmental factors, and it’s not always easy to separate them.
However, we can look at food preference in terms of the sensory properties of foods cognitive factors that influence our choices, and long term influences like culture.
Eat to Live
