Editorial

ISSN: 0034-6659

Article publication date: 11 September 2009

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Article Type: Editorial From: Nutrition & Food Science, Volume 39, Issue 5.

This is a really exciting special edition on factors affecting food choice.

Before we actually eat or drink something there are so many aspects that affect choice – these include:

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Culture – for example whether we are a vegan or Muslim has a profound affect on choice.
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Age – older people tend to like more traditional meals like roast meat and vegetables.
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Health – if people have a medical condition such as Coeliac disease this means they will be following a gluten free diet.
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Adverts – advertisements often tempt us to buy new foods.
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Peer pressure – especially in children and teenagers where food has to be the same as that that is eaten by their friends.
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Finance – has a massive impact as has the recent “credit crunch”, with people having to buy the cheaper alternatives to the ones they usually buy.
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Habit – if you always eat a pudding you are likely to always do so.
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Organolepsis – or the physical attributes of a food have a powerful effect.
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Addictions – this is particularly relevant to alcohol but some people find they crave for sweet items or salty ones.

Therefore in this edition of Nutrition and Food Science papers cover many of these factors with the following points being researched:

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Production of flavours in dairy foods – discussing particularly fruit flavour production such as is used in dairy products.
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Food habits of young people are covered in studies of dietary habits of pregnant and non-pregnant adolescents and food habits of university students.
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Organolepsis including the sensory characteristics of foods for children provides an interesting insight into important factors.
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Advertising and healthy food options in Greece is analysed using an interesting food model of the Mediterranean diet pyramid.
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The way information is presented is of paramount importance and the investigations on Turkish consumers regarding attitudes to grammar and nutrition messages and their compliance is an innovative approach which showed significant effects of grammatical styles.
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From Finland there are two new approaches to research in young people using Maslow's hierarchy model plus there is a plate model and the findings could have an impact on assisting young people to make balanced food choices.
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Body mass indexes are a way of measuring the relationship of weight and height to health status and a paper on academic achievement, BMI and fast food intake of American and Japanese students shows some interesting findings.
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There is great interest in health foods with exotic fruits being awarded “superfood” status and the one on Noni which is regarded as a therapeutic and health food in India provides a novel approach.

Mabel Blades