Characterizing Adolescents' Dietary Intake by Taste: Results From the UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey

Abstract

The taste of foods is a key factor for adolescents' food choices and intakes, yet, exploring taste characteristics of adolescents' diet is limited. Using food records for 284 adolescents (10–19 years old) from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS), year 9 (2016–2017), we classified diets according to taste. Tastes for each food consumed were generated from a previous survey that asked participants to allocate one main taste to each food. Responses from that survey were processed and included in a Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) to identify taste clusters. The resulting tastes were then applied to the adolescents' food records in the NDNS. For each individual, the total weight of food per day for each taste was calculated. A linear regression model was used to explore dietary intakes from each taste. Findings reveal that adolescents' daily energy intake was highest (34%) from foods that taste sweet. Sweet foods were the main calorie contributors at breakfast and daytime snacking, while energy intake from neutral-tasting foods was higher at lunch and dinner. Sweet food intake was significantly positively associated with higher energy, sugar, and fat intakes. For each percentage increase in sweet foods, energy increased by 10 kcal/d (95% CI 6, 15; P < 0.01). Savory food intake was lower in carbohydrates and sugars; with neutral food consumption inversely associated with energy, carbohydrate, sugars, saturated and total fat. Higher salty food intake was linked to higher saturated fat as well as sodium consumption. Sweet and neutral foods dominate the UK adolescent diet, followed by savory tastes. Balancing the contributions of different tasting foods could assist in improving adolescent diet quality.