Cooking is Very Important Belive It or Not!

Evidence suggests that developing cooking and food preparation skills is important for health and nutrition, yet the practice of home cooking is declining and now rarely taught in school. A new study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that developing cooking skills as a young adult may have long-term benefits for health and nutrition.

"The impact of developing cooking skills early in life may not be apparent until later in adulthood when individuals have more opportunity and responsibility for meal preparation," said lead author Jennifer Utter, PhD, MPH, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. "The strength of this study is the large, population-based sample size followed over a period of 10 years to explore the impact of perceived cooking skills on later nutritional well-being."

Data were collected as part of the Project Eating and Activity in Teens and Young Adults longitudinal study conducted in Minneapolis-Saint Paul area schools. Participants reported on adequacy of cooking skills in 2002-2003 when they were 18 to 23 years old. Data was then collected in 2015-2016 on nutrition-related outcomes when participants were 30 to 35 years old. Questions assessed the perceived adequacy of cooking skills, how often they prepared a meal that included vegetables, how often they ate meals as a family, and how often they ate at a fast food restaurant.

Most participants perceived their cooking skills to be adequate at age 18 -- 23, with approximately one quarter of adults reporting their cooking skills to be very adequate. There were no differences in perceived cooking skills by sex, race or ethnicity, educational attainment, or age. Perceived adequacy of cooking skills predicted multiple indicators of nutrition outcomes later in adulthood including greater odds of preparing a meal with vegetables most days and less frequent consumption of fast food. If those who perceived their cooking skills as adequate had families, they ate more frequent family meals, less frequent fast food meals, and had fewer barriers to food preparation.

"Opportunities to develop cooking skills by adolescents may result in long-term benefits for nutritional well-being," said Dr. Utter. "Families, health and nutrition professionals, educators, community agencies, and funders can continue to invest in home economics and cooking education knowing that the benefits may not be fully realized until young adults develop more autonomy and live independently."

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Materials provided by Elsevier. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Parenting and personality work together to affect baby's weight gain

Offering a snack may be a sure way to soothe a fussy child, but researchers say making it a habit can result in unnecessary weight gain in babies with certain temperaments.

The researchers studied the babies' temperament and how their mothers soothed them when the babies were six months old. When the researchers followed up a year later, they found that the more the mothers used food to soothe, the more weight certain babies gained.

 

The effect was only seen in babies with surgent temperament -- characterized by being more outgoing, active and drawn to new things and people.

Cynthia Stifter, professor of human development and psychology, Penn State, said the results suggest that when parents give surgent babies food when they're not hungry -- when they're trying to calm them, for example -- those babies may be more likely to later eat for pleasure, rather than just when they're hungry.

 

"Surgent children tend to have greater reward sensitivity than other kids -- and thus greater sensitivity in the dopamine area of the brain," Stifter said. "So if food, which is highly rewarding, lights up that area quickly and intensely, they may make a stronger connection between food and feeling good, causing them to seek out food more often in the future."

Previous research has linked surgent temperament with greater weight gain and higher body mass index, but few studies have examined how a baby's temperament affects how parents feed their children. Stifter said the results are an example of how a baby's temperament can influence how his or her parents choose to parent.

"When babies respond to things in a certain way, parents pick up on that," Stifter said. "So in many ways, the baby's behavior is influencing the parents' behavior. If a parent wants to stop their child from crying, and they know that food will do that, they may use that strategy, particularly if other methods are not working."

The researchers asked 160 mothers to keep a three-day diary about how often their babies cried and what they did to calm them when the babies were six months old. The babies' temperament were also evaluated by both the parents and the researchers, who noted traits related to anger, fear, sadness, activity levels, smiling and laughing, and how the child reacted to new things and people, among others.

 

The researchers followed up a year later, when the children were 18 months old, to measure how much weight the babies gained in the previous year. They found that the more parents used food to soothe their babies when they weren't hungry, the more weight those babies gained, but only if those infants were also observed as having a surgent temperament.

The effect wasn't seen in non-surgent babies whose parents used food to soothe or in surgent babies whose parents did not use food to soothe.

Stifter said that parents may be tempted to use food to calm a crying baby because it's effective. But she added that using food as a reward can ultimately lead to overeating, especially in surgent children, and be a risk for developing obesity later on.

"Surgent kids tend to get bored easily because they're always looking for something new to capture their attention," Stifter said. "So if they're bored, and this connection has been set up in their brain between food and feeling good, they may turn to food, not out of hunger but because they're looking for something to do."

Stifter said that while there's no guarantee that these kids will turn out to be obese, other research has shown that quick, rapid weight gain puts them at risk. She said the study's results -- recently published in the International Journal of Obesity -- could be used to design new ways to educate parents about feeding their babies.

"I'd like to see parent education programs have a temperament component, to teach parents more about what their child's temperament means for them," Stifter said. "I'd also like to see these programs teach parents about hunger cues so they know when their babies are hungry, so as to avoid using food to soothe their babies when they are not hungry."

Story Source: Materials provided by Penn State. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.