Fear of new foods may affect more than dietary variety

By Hugo Francisco de SouzaReviewed by Susha Cheriyedath, M.Sc.Jul 14 2026

Adults who were more reluctant to try unfamiliar foods consistently reported poorer overall health, highlighting how food-related personality traits may shape both diet and well-being.

Study: Food neophobia is associated with lower self-reported physical and mental health. Image Credit: Kaspars Grinvalds / Shutterstock

In a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers investigated whether food neophobia (FN) is independently associated with self-reported health, and to what extent this chronic reluctance to consume unfamiliar foods relates to adults’ mental and physical well-being.

The study analyzed data from 4,537 adults across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia and found that higher levels of food neophobia were significantly associated with lower self-reported physical and mental health scores. These data are among the first to show that food neophobia is linked to poorer self-reported overall well-being across physical and mental health measures.

Background

Decades of research and public health campaigns have emphasized that maintaining a diverse diet is a cornerstone of long-term health. The quality and diversity of the foods an individual consumes have been implicated as important influences on the risk of multisystemic diseases, particularly cardiovascular disease (CVD), type 2 diabetes (T2D), and several cancer subtypes.

However, research suggests that achieving dietary variety remains difficult for a substantial portion of the population due to food neophobia (FN). FN is a personality trait traditionally characterized by an individual’s avoidance of novel or unusual foods.

FN was traditionally considered a predominantly childhood-associated trait, but a growing body of evidence indicates that, in many people, FN persists into adulthood, manifesting as broader anxiety toward intense flavors, foreign ingredients, or potential food contamination.

Consequently, adults who exhibit the trait have been shown to consume fewer fruits and vegetables, while also reporting greater intake of soft drinks, sweets, saturated fats, carbohydrates, and salt.

Researchers had not yet established whether these dietary and behavioral patterns were associated with measurable differences in adults’ perceived physical and psychological health.

About the Study

The present study aimed to address this knowledge gap and inform future research by pooling cross-sectional data from four extensive online surveys conducted between 2021 and 2023. The final sample cohort comprised data from 4,537 adult participants from the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), and Australia.

To ensure an even split between men and women and between the two broad age groups, 18 to 45 years and 46 to 69 years, the study adopted a quota system to balance participants. Participants then completed two primary validated assessments to determine the strength of their FN trait and their self-reported physical and mental health: the Food Neophobia Scale (FNS) and the 12-Item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-12), respectively.

Statistical analyses predominantly leveraged general linear models (GLMs) and commonality analysis to estimate the relationship between food neophobia and health scores and assess the separate and overlapping contributions of FN and demographic variables, including age, gender, education level, and country of residence.

Study Findings

The study’s analyses revealed that as individuals’ FN strength increased, self-reported overall, physical, and mental health metrics declined significantly. These associations remained statistically significant in analyses that separately considered age, country, education, and gender as potential moderators.

The data further indicate that as food neophobia rises, participants’ perceptions of their own physical health decline, with the most pronounced drops observed in the youngest and oldest age cohorts. Participants’ self-perceptions of their mental health similarly demonstrated declines, although the strength of this association did not differ significantly between age groups.

Notably, while demographic factors were found to alter participants’ baseline health self-perceptions, with women generally reporting lower health scores than men, the study’s commonality analysis indicated that FN accounted for a unique component of the variance not explained by the examined demographic factors. However, the negative association between FN and health scores was generally more pronounced among men than women.

Together, these findings extend previous research by identifying FN as an independent correlate of self-reported health after accounting for participants’ age, gender, education, and country of residence.

Conclusions

This study is among the first to link higher food neophobia with lower self-reported overall, physical, and mental health after accounting for the measured demographic variables. While the study was limited by its reliance on participants’ self-reported health perceptions rather than objective clinical health measures, these subjective metrics have historically been associated with chronic disease, health risk factors, and mortality.

The cross-sectional analysis cannot establish whether food neophobia causes poorer health, and the researchers collected no dietary data, objective clinical or physiological measures, or direct assessments of proposed mechanisms such as generalized anxiety, stress, or autonomic arousal. The online samples were also not nationally representative, and the data were extracted retrospectively from surveys originally conducted for other food-related research purposes.

While additional research is needed to confirm these hypotheses, the authors proposed that poorer dietary quality, heightened food-related or generalized arousal, and diminished enjoyment of eating may contribute to the observed relationship. However, none of these potential mechanisms was directly assessed in the study.

The insights support further investigation of how personality and psychological traits may shape dietary behavior, perceived health, and the effectiveness of public health and dietary interventions.