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Most of the studies published on childhood food neophobia rely on parents’ reports of their children’s degree of neophobia and not on children’s reports. Information about children’s food behavior obtained from questionnaires provided to the parents may be misleading because relying solely on parent’s reports underestimates the role of the child in the process. The aim of the present study was to develop and validate a self-report measure of food neophobia designed for Italian primary school children by adapting the Food Neophobia Scale (FNS) proposed by Pliner and Hobden in 1992. The Italian Child Food Neophobia Scale (ICFNS) consists of 8 items (4 neophobic and 4 neophilic). Simple and age-appropriate vocabulary was used, and items were slightly modified to describe situations likely to be familiar to children. The ICFNS was tested on a sample of 491 6- to 9-year-old Italian children. Internal consistency and test–retest reliability were satisfactory. External validity data showed that the ICFNS predicted both the children’s willingness to taste and liking of novel food. The results analyzed by age group indicated that younger children (6 years old) were not repeatable between the first and second administration of the questionnaire. Additionally, the ICFNS scores for the 6- and 7-year-old children were not significantly correlated with either willingness to taste or liking one of the two novel foods tested. Therefore, the ICFNS can be reliably used with Italian primary school children starting from the age of 8 years and most likely as early as 7 years. For 6-year-old children, adapted administration methods are recommended to achieve reliable results. Developing scales to measure food neophobia directly in children has important implications for the study of childhood eating behavior and may be an effective tool for measuring children’s willingness to try new food when administering school-based food educational programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effectiveness of the ‘Food Dudes’ school-based intervention consisting of rewards, peer-modeling and food exposure on food neophobia and the liking of fruits and vegetables (FV) in a large cohort of children. Five-hundred sixty children recruited from three schools were assigned to the experimental or control group. For 16 days, children in the experimental group watched motivational videos, were read letters to encourage them to eat FV and received a small reward for eating one portion of both a fruit and a vegetable. The control group was only provided with FV for the same time period. Food neophobia and liking were measured in both groups of children before and after the intervention, and a follow-up measurement was carried out 6 months later. The intervention was effective in reducing food neophobia and, most importantly, a persistent effect was observed 6 months after the intervention as children of the experimental group showed significantly lower neophobia scores than the control group. Additionally, the program was effective in increasing liking for both FV; however, this effect was maintained only for fruit after 6 months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food acceptance and food choice are largely driven by taste preferences and liking, particularly among children. It is often assumed that overweight individuals differ from their normal-weight counterparts in that they prefer foods that are thought implicated in the development of obesity. Despite this, previous findings concerning the relationship between adults’ adiposity and food liking are inconclusive, and research in children is limited. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship among body mass index (BMI), food neophobia and liking of fruits and vegetables (F&V) in a large cohort of Italian children ( n = 528, aged 6–9 years) in an ecological environment. According to principal component analysis (PCA), the BMI was unrelated to either the food neophobia or the liking values. Food neophobia was negatively correlated with liking of both F&V, but liking of vegetables contributed more in discriminating children according to their neophobia level than fruits liking. This suggests that liking of vegetables is a better indicator of children’s food neophobia than liking of fruits. This outcome was further confirmed as low, medium and highly neophobic children differed significantly for their vegetables liking but not for fruits liking. Food neophobia was higher in boys than in girls and decreased systematically with increasing age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]