Food Preferences

The world tremendous development has brought about the expanse of food. Because of different culture, geographical locations, food preferences is various all over the world. For this reason, food preference attract the attention of scientists, nutritionists , especially teenagers' food preferences , due to the desire of investigate the way food affect humankind health.

Food preference is defined as the selection of one food over another. Monica L. Smith defined food as " the way in which people choose from among available comestibles on the basis of biological or economic perceptions including taste, value, purity, ease or difficulty of preparation, and the availability of fuel and other preparation tools " . Nowadays, teenager choose food they like without considering about its contains. Because of busy life, they choose fast food, snack which is non - nutritive over nutritive-rich ones , rice, meat , and do not care if it shorten their life, damage their health or cause many disease. Moreover, teenager seem to enjoy foreign food more than their traditional food. Many Korean or Japanese restaurant appear more and more in Vietnamses. For instance, sushi , a traditional food of Japanese, or kimbab, a tradition food of Korean, is well - known all and consumed by most of people over the world. In a word, teenager nowadays choose food base on their personal liking even though it may harm their health.

Food preferences play an important role in people health. According to a survey which was conducted by a group of researchers in America, 80% students prefer French fries to Boiled potatoes , which only holds 5%. However, French fries are not a nutrition option owing to their excessive fat content, people need to hold this trend back. Another survey which is conducted in Canada shows that 41% teenagers eat junk food, such as snack most of time, and 48% of teenager like them while only 1% teenager do not like junk food. Base on the survey, only a small number of teenagers do not choose fast food, in constrast, majority of teenagers seem to prefer food which satisfy their taste. As a consequence, food preferences cause many problem and one of them is obesity. Fast food contains a high amount of sugar and lipid which is very harmful. In summary, teenagers nowadays are easy to obese because of their choice, in order to avoid this problem, they need to change their food preference into a healthier one.

As can be seen from the description above, teenager 's choice of food preferences affect their health and they are choosing a harmful food preference. In order to make perfect growth, teenager need to choose wisely and change it.