The influence of “the body owner's program” on ten-year-olds' food beliefs

We measured the food beliefs of 519 South Australian ten-year-olds before and after they took part in a large nutrition and physical education program that was designed to evaluate the effects of either self-monitoring or health-information dissemination, or a combination of these two teaching strategies on large sets of cognitive, behavioral, and biomedical outcome variables. Multivariate analysis of the data revealed that the children's food beliefs could be represented by two mutually independent components: a “healthiness” versus “sweet-fattening” dimension and a sensory-evaluation dimension. These cognitive structures were highly stable during the duration of the study (six months). The greatest change occurred in the beliefs of the self-monitoring plus health-information treatment group. Specifically, at the end of the project these children applied the concept “gives you energy” more appropriately than previously. We discuss the relevance of the findings to nutrition education.