Three juicy morsels: Wine confusion and kids

Hot off the press, here are three interesting bits from the latest Food Quality and Preference journal.

Firstly a study looked at what level of sweetness people liked in white wine. They thing correlated that with personality type. They found:

Sweet taste preference was associated with a higher level of impulsiveness but lower openness

This is very interesting as I am a self confessed sweet tooth and so does Tiffany. We would also so that we both have a level of impulsiveness, though I would definitely be more impulsive. Also over the last year of so we have been working on being more open with others (within the cultural norms of being open). Thus we realize that we have not been very open. So personal experience backs this up.

Another article looked at parents and their interaction with nutritional information, unsurprisingly they found:

Parents seldom use nutritional information when they seem to sense an overflow of information, information that is too technical and a problematic presentation of energy distribution, and/or when their health consciousness is limited. Having to deal with information overflow, technical information and energy distribution makes parents more likely to prefer food labels with concise information and more visual aspects.

No surprises here. When I get something I can't easily understand I tend to ignore it. Food labels can be incredibly confusing as they contain heaps of information that you have to sort through. A tip that I got once (thanks Robin Farmer) was that if more than 10g of sugar or fat per 100 g then this is not good. This gives a simple and easy to remember rule that declutters the food tables.

Lastly researches presented kids with various tastes and then analyzed their facial expressions. It was found that:

For disliked liquids, the majority of the AUs displayed were negative, whereas for neutral and liked liquids the number of positive and negative AUs was similar. On the basis of our results, we conclude that facial expressions are suitable to measure dislike...

So when your young ones screws up their faces - it could mean that they like it! This is because the neutral or liked food gives approximately the same number of negative faces and positive faces. I would do well to remember this and ask if the kids liked the food, instead of assuming the worst.