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Food & Nutrition : OPALINE Program Researchers Monitoring 314 Children

http://www.bulletins-electroniques.com/actualites/63223.htm

By mid-2011, more than 300 children will have been monitored from birth to the age of 2, and older for some. OPALINE (Observatoire des Préférences Alimentaires du Nourrisson et de l'Enfant, the Observatory of Infant and Child Food Preferences), a program unmatched worldwide, is accredited by the Vitagora competitive cluster and funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the Burgundy Region, among others. The twenty odd researchers involved in the program collected data on the children's eating habits, assessed their sensory reactions to smells and tastes and took a closer look at their psychosocial environment. Their research has improved scientists' knowledge of the factors explaining the variability of food preferences at the age of two. OPALINE Coordinator Sophie Nicklaus, an INRA research fellow at the Center of Taste and Food Sciences in Dijon, talks about some of the most striking program results.

OPALINE, A Bold Adventure

The INRA researcher immediately pointed out that the word "observatory" was important. "It tells you that our research is not experimental, but is limited to observing the behavior of children at different developmental ages and understanding how their food preferences are shaped," she explained. The OPALINE adventure began in 2005. And an adventure it was - just think of the work involved putting together a cohort of more than 300 children whose parents agreed to play by the rules for two years. The arrangement for the experiment that was rolled out during the first years was complicated and generated a huge workload of fine detailed analyses for the researchers. "When we started OPALINE, we had planned to work with a group of 120 children because our resources were limited. However, we received additional funding and thus were able to begin another recruitment phase that ended in mid-2009. OPALINE has 314 children in the program to date," she said.

As the first children of the OPALINE cohort were recruited in 2005, some of them are now nearly five and are still being monitored by the researchers. "At program startup, our first concern was to observe what happened before the age of two and to what extent the food experiences during a child first two years of life would shape its taste. Obviously, the process isn't over at age two as a child is far from having reached its dietary maturity," the Dijon based researcher explained. This prompted the researchers to continue monitoring the children in the cohort past the age of two, but not as intensely. Once a year, around the birthday of each child, the researchers interview the parents about certain aspects of the child's behavior and food preferences. The goal is to continue monitoring the children, at least until they reach six, especially since the parents who are actively committed to the program would like to continue the experiment. "We selected the age of two at OPALINE startup also because our resources were limited."

Patron Industry Operators Interested in Results

All the results of the OPALINE program will only be available during the second semester in 2011. Nevertheless, the striking preliminary results highlighted in Camille Schwartz's thesis on "The Dynamics of Taste Preferences", which she defended in July 2009, or the research on parents' child-rearing practices conducted by Sandrine Monnery Patris, CSGA, and Nathalie Rigal, Paris-X Nanterre University, have already been published in scientific journals, or will soon be. The researchers observed that the preference for salty tastes in children appears at the early age of 6 months and continues until the age of 12 months. "This stage will probably guide the child in its approach to food," Sophie Nicklaus stated. Another fact is that at the same age the children do not seem inconvenienced by the acidity of some fruit. They even seem to like it. The researchers also discovered that there is a relation between how long breast-feeding lasts and the appreciation of the umami taste, in other words monosodium glutamate, at the age of six months. "So, there is a continuity in the formation of taste," she said.

The above are some of the first OPALINE results that are of particular interest to industry operators. Not only is OPALINE funded by the French National Research Agency and the Burgundy Region, but also by industry operators under their corporate patronage policies. At project outset, the program sponsors wanted to open funding to corporate patronage so that industry would back the program without demanding anything in exchange in terms of defining the scientific program. Several industry operators agreed to embark on the adventure. They included CEDUS (Centre d'Etudes et de Documentation du Sucre, Center for Sugar Research and Documentation), Nestlé via its research center in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Danone via its Blédina subsidiary. "Every year, we hold a meeting where we present the results to the patrons. The last meeting was held last autumn. We have very open discussions about our issues and I think that the industry operators are very interested in the results that OPALINE is gradually compiling," Sophie Nicklaus stated.

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CSGA - Sophie Nicklaus - email: nicklaus@dijon.inra.fr

Code brève
ADIT : 63223

ADIT - Jean-François Desessard - email: jfd@adit.fr

eTech France numéro 241 (3/05/2010) - ADIT / ADIT - http://www.bulletins-electroniques.com/actualites/63223.htm