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Randomized Controlled Trial
. 2022 Sep 27;14(19):4000.
doi: 10.3390/nu14194000.

Changes in Eating Behaviors Following Taste Education Intervention: Focusing on Children with and without Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Their Families: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Sigrun Thorsteinsdottir  1 , Urdur Njardvik  2 , Ragnar Bjarnason  3   4 , Anna S Olafsdottir  1
Affiliations
Randomized Controlled Trial

Changes in Eating Behaviors Following Taste Education Intervention: Focusing on Children with and without Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Their Families: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Sigrun Thorsteinsdottir et al. Nutrients. .

Abstract

Fussy-eating children often display problematic behaviors around mealtimes, such as irritation, opposition, or may even throw tantrums. This may lead to reduced food variety and poor nutritional profiles, which may increase parents' worries about their children's diet, particularly when the children also have neurodevelopmental disorders (ND) such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). To investigate the effect of Taste Education on problematic mealtime behaviors, 81 children aged 8-12 years, with ND (n = 33) and without (n = 48), and their parents, participated in a 7-week Taste Education intervention. Children were matched on age, sex, and ND, and allocated at random into Immediate-intervention and Delayed-intervention groups. Parents completed the Meals in Our Household Questionnaire (MiOH). To examine changes in MiOH-scores, repeated-measures analysis-of-variance with time-points were used, with condition as factors (Immediate intervention and Delayed intervention). Baseline measures were adjusted for, and a robust linear mixed-model was fitted. Results showed superior outcomes for Intervention compared to waiting on all measures of MiOH, with stable effects through six-month follow-up. Differences were non-significant between children with and without ND. The Taste Education program suggests a promising, simple, and non-intrusive way to reduce children's problematic mealtime behaviors in the long term.

Keywords: ADHD; autism spectrum disorder; eating behaviors; fussy-eating; neurodevelopmental disorders; parents-child dyads; problematic mealtime behaviors.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flow diagram showing the intervention by stages of the study. In the Delayed intervention group, five siblings joined the children that had already been assigned to the group.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Study timeline showing time-points for pre-baseline and baseline assessments, post-intervention, and follow-up. Note. Abbreviation: MiOH, Meals in our Household Questionnaire.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Mean changes with standard error of the means for Meals in Our Household (MiOH) scores for the domains between time points.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Mean changes with standard error of the means for Meals in Our Household (MiOH), for the domains, between time points, based on ND-status.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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