Eat 600 grams of fruit and vegetables per day! This is the official Danish recommendation, but one that may be difficult for parents to get their children to put it into practice. Especially teenagers have their own opinions on the matter. In the research project Cool Snacks, scientists at Aarhus University aim to develop more appetising healthy snacks of fruit and vegetables.

- Teenagers like to be independent, so parents telling them to eat more greens does not necessarily have the desired effect, says PhD student Line Holler Mielby, who is participating in this part of the large project. She has also looked into which factors are important when the 10-16 year-olds select or deselect snacks of fruit and vegetables.

Complexity is good
Previous consumer surveys have shown that some of the things that are important when people select a particular food is whether the food is viewed as being complex or not. A bowl of chopped green peppers is perhaps reasonably appetizing, but a colourful mixture of red, green and yellow peppers will for most seem even more tempting.

A mixture of colours is not the only way to increase the complexity. It can also be increased by mixing different things together, like in a salad, or by cutting the product into smaller pieces, such as when you cut a somewhat dull brown and furry kiwi fruit into appetizing green slices.

However, it can also go a bit over the top. If the consumer perceives the food as being too complex – for example, being too much of a mishmash of different things – then it is deselected. As part of the results of her PhD studies, Line Holler Mielby documented that we have a bell-shaped curve for our preferences for some product when it comes to complexity. This is the first time that this has been scientifically documented in a fruit and vegetable context..

Teenagers are not like adults
Line Holler Mielby concentrated on teenagers’ choice of snack foods because of their extensive snack culture.

- Teenagers often snack between meals. You often see that when they eat for fun, for example when sitting with friends in front of the computer or TV, the snacks are unhealthier. This may be one of the causes of obesity among adolescents. Rather than discouraging young people from eating snacks, which seems to be an impossible task, we can instead work with this issue and try and promote healthy snacks, says Line Holler Mielby.

One of the questions that Line Holler Mielby was trying to answer was whether teenagers choose snacks from the same criteria as adults. In one of her studies, the participating adults and teenagers were offered three different groups of snacks made up of, respectively, vegetables, fruit, and a mixture of the two. There were 21 variations in all based on segmentation (cut into large or small pieces), colour (for example, green or blue grapes) and product (for example, with or without blueberries).

The vegetable group consisted of peppers, where the simplest choice was yellow peppers cut into strips. The most complex selections were mixtures of yellow, red and orange peppers cut into small pieces.

In the fruit group, the participants could choose between a single type of fruit – a mix of apples and green grapes with or without blueberries, or they could choose a complex selection where the most complex was a mixture of blue and green grapes, small pieces of apple and blueberries.

In the fruit and vegetable mixtures, the participating teenagers and adults could choose between different combinations of green grapes, yellow and red peppers, blueberries, and carrots.

Results from the experiments showed that the colour, cut, and mix of unusual combinations and types of product all affected the adults' choice of snack, whilst the young people to a larger extent were influenced by colour and the contrast of colours.

Boys, girls, urban or rural
Line Holler Mielby also found that there was a difference between the choices made by boys and girls. The girls were more likely to choose fruit and vegetable snacks. The boys in the study reported a larger appetite than the girls and had a tendency to prefer the baked, savoury and sweet snacks.

The town-country divide also affected their choice of snack, where young people from the country were more likely to choose fruit and vegetables than their peers from the city.

 - Results from the study show that it can be very relevant to target the development of new snack products for different segments of society, where you base it on whether they are for teenagers or adults, and when it comes to teenagers, also on whether they are for boys or girls and to some extent also whether they are from the city or the country. The latter has previously been shown by, among others, scientists in our department, says Line Holler Mielby.

Further information: PhD student Line Holler Mielby, Department of Food Science, telephone: +45 8715 4868, email: LineH.Mielby@agrsci.dk