Fetal Sense of Taste: What Your Baby Can Taste in Utero

Mothers might not realize that the tastes and flavors they savor while pregnant can influence their babies' palates later. Maggie Starbard/NPR hide explanation

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Maggie Starbard/NPR

Want your child to love veggies? Offset early. Very early on. Research shows that what a woman eats during pregnancy not merely nourishes her babe in the womb, but may shape nutrient preferences later in life.

At 21 weeks after conception, a developing baby weighs well-nigh as much every bit a can of Coke — and he or she can taste it, likewise. Still in the womb, the growing baby gulps down several ounces of amniotic fluid daily. That fluid surrounding the baby is really flavored past the foods and beverages the mother has eaten in the last few hours.

"Things similar vanilla, carrot, garlic, anise, mint — these are some of the flavors that accept been shown to be transmitted to amniotic fluid or mother'due south milk," says Julie Mennella, who studies taste in infants at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. In fact, Mennella says in that location isn't a single flavor they have found that doesn't show up in utero. Her work has been published in the journal Pediatrics.

The Odour Of Amniotic Fluid

To determine if flavors are passed from the female parent to the the baby via the amniotic fluid, researchers gave women garlic capsules or saccharide capsules before taking a routine sample of their amniotic fluid — so asked a console of people to smell the samples.

"And it was easy," says Mennella. "They could option out the samples easily from the women who ate garlic." The sense of gustation is actually 90-percent smell, she added, and then they knew just from the odor that the babies could taste information technology.

Mennella says she got the idea from dairy farmers, who in the 1960s and 70s were doing research on how the diet of the dairy cow impacted the flavour of the milk. She says cows that graze on wild garlic and onion, or who live in stinking barns, produce milk with singled-out flavors.

But Mennella says that not only is the amniotic fluid and breast milk in humans flavored by nutrient but like cows, merely memories of these flavors are formed fifty-fifty before nascence. That could upshot in preferences for these foods or odors for a lifetime. In other words, if you eat broccoli while you're significant, there'southward a much improve chance your baby volition like broccoli.

Mennella says this had already been observed in rabbits, and so she decided to exam information technology in homo babies — with carrots. Meaning women were divided into three groups. One group was asked to drink carrot juice every solar day during their pregnancy, another during breastfeeding and a third to avoid carrots completely. Then when the children began to swallow solid nutrient, researchers fed them cereal made either with water, or carrot juice and videotaped their responses.

Introducing Babies To Food Culture

"And just like the European rabbit, the babies who had experienced carrot in amniotic fluid or female parent's milk ate more of the carrot-flavored cereal," says Mennella. "And when we analyzed the video tapes they made less negative faces while eating it."

This makes a lot of evolutionary sense, says Mennella. Since mothers tend to feed their children what they eat themselves, it is nature's fashion of introducing babies to the foods and flavors that they are likely to encounter in their family and their culture.

"Each individual baby is having their ain unique feel, it's irresolute from hour to hour, from day to day, from month to month," says Mennella. "Every bit a stimulus it's providing and then much information to that baby about who they are as a family unit and what are the foods their family unit enjoys and appreciates."

That very idea got Matty Lau thinking 'how is it that kids in other cultures swallow foods that are spicy, bitter, or accept pungent flavors?' She'due south a Chinese-American who had a baby in late July and recalls growing upwards eating foods most American kids she knows would never touch.

"My parents are bully cooks — and so they'll melt things like preserved oysters. I always wondered how it was that I was able to grow upwards eating bitter vegetables similar kale and mustard greens and things similar ginger," says Lau.

Instilling A Dearest Of Chinese Flavors Before Birth

While she was pregnant, she consciously tried to provide her infant with the flavors she loves from her native Chinese cuisine. She the hopes that when her baby is older, it will share her honey of flavorful food.

"I was actually concerned that my child savor food every bit much as the rest of my family," says Lau.

University of Florida taste researcher Linda Bartoshuk says babies are born with very few hard and fast sense of taste preferences. She says Mennella'southward work shows that very early exposures to flavors – both before and after birth — brand it more probable that children will accept a wide diversity of flavors. And when those early on exposures are reinforced over a lifetime, Bartoshuk thinks they might have far-reaching implications, fifty-fifty promoting proficient eating.

"To what extent can nosotros make a baby consume a healthier nutrition by exposing it to all the right flavors — broccoli, carrots, lima beans, et cetera? Could we practice that or non? My judge is we could," says Bartoshuk.

Menella acknowledges that many toddlers will still brand a sour face when given broccoli, no thing how much the mother ate while significant. And peradventure they volition never like information technology. But she says parents should go on exposing immature children to these flavors considering they can eventually learn to like them.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/139033757/babys-palate-and-food-memories-shaped-before-birth

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