THE SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 

Under the provisions of the regulations for the degree 

MASTER OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN 

on

Thursday, July 25, 2024 

9:00 am - 10:00 am EST

Join Teams Meeting: Virtual Link: 

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MGE3MzliMWItOGNlMC00ZTZiLWE4YTctZmY0NzQ5ODBkZDlm%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22482198bb-ae7b-4b25-8b7a-6d7f32faa083%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%224336078d-d230-44cf-adcc-4cd2025244ac%22%7d

Radha Soman

will present a thesis defense entitled,

"Flavour-flavour learning to help parents stimulate the disliked vegetable consumption habit in toddlers using liked vegetables"

" 

Advisor:

                 Dr. EunSook Kwon, Georgia Tech School of Industrial Design 

Committee:

           Dr. HyunJoo Oh, Georgia Tech School of Industrial Design

Dr. Yixiao Wang, School of Industrial Design 

                                                                    Faculty and students are invited to attend this presentation.

Abstract

Developing habits for vegetable consumption should be employed early on in life to help reduce major potential future health problems such as obesity. According to the Dietary Guidelines of 2015-2020, in the United States, 90% of children are not meeting their daily vegetable needs, where vegetables are consumed 6 times less as compared to fruits in the age range of 2-5 years children. The major reason for this is food neophobia; fear of novel foods especially vegetables. Food neophobia affects 50-75% of children within the age range of 2-5 years old. Food neophobia symptoms could be drastically reduced if parents are involved in developing vegetable consumption habits creatively and engagingly for children to pick on and a positive home environment with fun and playful strategies opens up a lot of possibilities to reduce the neophobia symptoms regarding vegetable consumption. This study aims to understand the current strategies used by parents to feed vegetables to kids having a fear of trying vegetables, and gain insights about how the kid behaves when exposed to different combinations of vegetable components such as flavour, colour, texture, shape, and smell, to help parents understand their kid's vegetable eating behaviour. This study helps in designing an intervention will verify if the parents can develop the vegetable consumption habit in their kids by associating the vegetables they dislike with the vegetables they like to establish flavour-flavour learning to for disliked vegetable acceptance, in turn, develop long-term vegetable consumption habits in their kids.