Pizzas, burgers, juices etc have a dedicated set of audience across ages. Although much has been spoken about the detriments of junk food, we still add them to our cheat diet. But did you know, children prefer natural food over the processed ones?! Sounds quite a revelation’ isn’t it? A new study has recently found that kids find the naturally made foods to be tastier and safer than the packaged ones. A study, conducted by researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Yale, inferred, “kids rate foods they perceive to be natural as having greater levels of taste, safety, and desire than foods they perceive to be manufactured”.

For this particular study, the researchers surveyed the preferences of more than 374 adults and children in the United States. These people (subjects) were given apples and orange juices of different origins.

In one of the studies, 137 children between six to 10 years were given three types of apples – “one was grown in a farm, one was made in a lab, and another grown on a tree inside a lab,” an ANI report reads. Same study was performed on adults to understand and compare the preferences as per age groups. After assessing the preferences, it was found that both the age groups preferred the apples “they believed were grown on farms to those grown in labs”.

Likewise, in another study, 85 children (aged five to seven years) and 64 adults were given four types of orange juices to taste. “One described as squeezed on a farm, one with no information about it, one with chemicals allegedly removed and one described as having chemicals added,” the ANI report further reads. Here too, participants preferred the one that was more natural.

After conducting both the studies, researchers stated that age is not a factor when it comes to taste and also suggested that “natural foodstuffs are good could be established at five-years-old — and possibly even younger”.

The researchers concluded saying that this study could be considered the first step towards understanding how our preferences could be driven towards fresh and natural food, eliminating the consumption of processed food as much as possible.