42 Food Choice
Birch et al., 2001), which operationalizes control in terms of monitoring,
restriction, and pressure to eat, and Wardle and colleagues using the
Parental Feeding Style Questionnaire (PFSQ; Wardle et al., 2002), which
operationalizes control in terms of restriction and items such as “I control
how many snacks my child should have.” Third, and related to the above,
these contradictory results may reflect the contradictory nature of parental
control with parental control being a more complex construct than is
acknowledged by any of the existing measures. Ogden, Reynolds et al. (2006)
explored this third possibility and examined the effect of differentiating
between “overt control,” which can be detected by the child (e.g., being firm
about how much your child should eat), and “covert control,” which can-
not be detected by the child (e.g., not buying unhealthy foods and bringing
them into the house). The results showed that these different forms of con-
trol did differently predict snack food intake and that whilst higher covert
control was related to decreased intake of unhealthy snacks, higher overt
control predicted an increased intake of healthy snacks. Similar results were
also found by Ogden and colleagues in another sample of parents with small
children (Brown et al., 2008), indicating that whilst some forms of control may
well be detrimental to a child’s diet, others may be beneficial. In particular,
controlling the child’s environment in terms of what food is brought into
the house or which cafés and restaurants they visit may encourage healthy
eating without having the rebound effect of more obvious forms of control.
The role of covert control is further supported by evidence that children
eat according to the amount on their plate and that the best predictor of
the amount consumed is the amount served, suggesting that parents can
successfully control their children’s diets (Mrdjenovic and Levitsky, 2005).
Food and physiological consequences
Studies have also explored the association between food cues and physio-
logical responses to food intake. There is a wealth of literature illustrating
the acquisition of food aversions following negative gastrointestinal con-
sequences (e.g., Garcia, Hankisn, and Rusiniak, 1974). For example, an aver-
sion to shellfish can be triggered after one case of stomach upset following
the consumption of mussels. Research has also explored pairing food cues
with the sense of satiety which follows their consumption. One early study
of infants showed that by about 40 days of age infants adjusted their
consumption of milk depending upon the calorific density of the drink they
were given (Formon, 1974). Similarly, children can adjust their food intake
according to the flavor of foods if certain flavors have been consistently
paired with a given calorific density (Birch and Deysher, 1986).