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Food plating preferences – reply to reply regarding Zampollo et al

Sir, The increase in childhood obesity is a major health issue in the United States and all over the world (1), and many possible approaches are proposed to overturn the trend (2). The study conducted by Zampollo et al. (3) provides one such approach because it shows that children prefer food presentations differently from adult preferences. For instance, while adults prefer three components and three colours, children prefer seven components and six colours on their plates. This suggests that, to encourage children to eat healthier foods, it may be a good idea to present more food items, especially more colourful vegetables. More recently, Smits (4) has criticized Zampollo et al.’s analyses as inadequate for concluding that the differences in plate preferences among children versus adults are significant. Namely, Smits highlighted that Zampollo et al. merely showed that particular most preferred options were chosen more often than could be expected under random distribution and did not identify the significance of these preferences in relation to the other choice options. In addition, Smits highlights that the analyses did not test the difference between preferences of different samples (i.e. children versus adults). We appreciated this criticism, and we conducted follow-up analyses directly comparing the preferences of children with the preferences of adults – as Smits suggested (4). Namely, we conducted one-way chi-square tests to compare the preferences of children with those of adults for each of the seven categories of presentations. For instance, we conducted a chi-square test (df = 5) for comparing the preferences of children with those of adults for the number of colours on a plate. As evident in Table 1, the results were highly significant across all categories except for the preferences of the empty and disorganized plates for both children and adults. These results are consistent with Zampollo et al.’s original conclusion, namely childrens food presentation preferences appear to be very different from those of adults. On a much finer detail, we can correct a difference in our original paper that was mistakenly identified as significant. Specifically, although we stated that both children and adults significantly preferred food presentations that are relatively disorganized, the effect was not significant for children, x(1) = 0.94, p > 0.05. While the results in our original paper were significant for adults with respect to relatively disorganized food presentations, the direct comparison between children and adults that we report in this letter and illustrate through Table 1 was not significant. Given the importance of plating on liking for food (5), we believe that this ambiguous finding, along with all of our more definitive findings, is worthy of further investigation.