Babies Develop Food Tastes in the Womb

Children often acquire their tastes in food when still in the womb after a new study conducted by researchers at Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center found that the food eaten by mothers when they were pregnant or during breastfeeding often influences what the babies would like to eat when they grow up. The researchers conducted a series of studies and found that the children of mothers who drank carrot juice often ate twice as much carrot-flavored cereal when they were being weaned while in another study, weaning babies ate 80gms of green beans on the final day of an 8-day experiment which started with the babies being fed 50gms of green beans.

“In the environment we evolved in, both sugars and salts were scarce. Sweet is a signal for energy, the predominant taste of mother's milk, [and] salt is meat and minerals. Babies are already biologically hardwired to be attracted to foods containing sugar and salt, but they have to be exposed to fruit and vegetables if they are to learn to accept and like these flavors”, lead researcher Dr Julie Mennella said.

Source-Medindia