WONDERING why your baby is fussy about or even exhibiting phobia towards trying new foods? It could be in the genes.

The findings from a twin study, Food fussiness and food neophobia share a common etiology in early childhood, published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry this month, suggests that there is significant genetic and environmental influence on food fussiness and food neophobia during early life.

Food fussiness is the tendency to be highly selective about which foods one is willing to eat, and emerges in early childhood; while food neophobia is a closely related characteristic, but specifically refers to rejection of unfamiliar food.

Parents and clinicians consider both food fussiness and food neophobia to be problematic behaviours. Participants in the study were 1,921 families with 16-month-old twins born in England and Wales in 2007.

Parents completed a Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire which included three food fussiness items and four food neophobia items.

It sought to identify, among other things, genetic and environmental contributions to variation in food fussiness and food neophobia.

“Shared environmental effects were found to explain a [great] proportion of the variation in food fussiness than food neophobia, suggesting that experiential factors in the home environment appear to be the most salient in explaining a etiological differences,” the authors found.

The authors said during early childhood, children are gradually introduced to an increasingly varied diet comprising previously unseen foods of different flavours, textures, and visual characteristics.

While some children willingly accept new foods, many others are hesitant.

These behaviours can be broadly characterised as food fussiness and food neophobia, and are characteristics of early childhood eating problems.

Food fussiness often focuses on food-specific attributes such as texture; while food neophobia is an overlapping construct, but refers specifically to the refusal to try unfamiliar foods.

“Fussiness is also associated with behavioural problems and concurrent and prospective symptoms of anxiety and depression; and interestingly, food neophobia is associated with characteristics such as shyness or inhibition,” the authors shared.

“The findings suggest that, in line with previous research, the home and familial environment play a more important role in shaping food fussiness than food neophobia in early life.

A key intervention to attenuate fussy eating behaviour is repeated exposure to the problem food; the premise being that the more a child tries a food, the more familiar and the more acceptable it becomes.

This is an avenue through which parents might modify food fussiness and food neophobia. However, this strategy may fail more often with a highly neophobic child.”