What if a mother could predispose her child to like broccoli or Brussels sprouts — or at least not make a face and spit it out — by what she ate during pregnancy?
Some health care practitioners are suggesting that if mothers include a wide range of foods in their diet during pregnancy, they can shape their children’s food preferences later in life. Those choices, researchers say, have the potential to reduce the risks of diabetes and obesity.
The concept is called prenatal flavor learning.
The flavor and odors of what mothers eat show up in the amniotic fluid, which is swallowed by the fetus, and in breast milk. There is evidence that fetal taste bud are mature in utero by 13 to 15 weeks, with taste receptor cells appearing at 16 weeks, according to researchers.
“With flavor learning, you can train a baby’s palate with repetitive exposure,” said Kim Trout, director of the nurse midwifery/women’s health nurse practitioner program at Georgetown University.
Ms. Trout recently co-authored a paper that reviews the evidence on prenatal flavor learning and its implications for controlling childhood obesity and diabetes, which are among the country’s most pressing health problems. She is incorporating the concept into the curriculum of Georgetown’s two-year midwifery master’s degree program. Starting in January, the reproductive health course for first-year students will include that concept in the section on prenatal care and nutrition, she said.
As a practicing midwife, she also advises patients who want to know what else they can do to maximize their baby’s health.
“I tell them there is good evidence that their babies could develop flavor preferences based on what they’re eating, and I also tell their partners if they are doing the cooking,” said Ms. Trout, who commutes between Washington and Philadelphia, where she sees patients at a private OB-GYN practice that is part of the University of Pennsylvania medical school and health system.
Some expectant mothers say the concept makes sense, and for those who already enjoy eating a variety of food, all the better.
“I’m not a picky eater. I love all foods,” said Elizabeth Hooks, 29, of Philadelphia, who is one of Ms. Trout’s patients. Nineteen weeks pregnant, Ms. Hooks said she does not want her child to grow up and “be a member of the fast-food nation. If I can start now, that’s wonderful.”
Ms. Hooks works at the corporate office of retailer Anthropologie. Her lunch on a recent weekday included a wide sampling from the cafeteria salad bar: chicken and cranberry salad, asparagus, tomato and mozzarella salad, and fresh kiwi.
The concept of prenatal flavor learning is not widely known among the general population or among health care professionals who take care of pregnant women. But even those who aren’t familiar with the research say they don’t see a downside if the science can encourage healthy eating.
Sumi Sexton, a family medicine physician in Arlington, Va., and an assistant professor at Georgetown’s medical school, said practitioners already encourage mothers-to-be to eat healthy foods as a way to model that behavior later for their children.
“If the science supports it and the baby is getting an acquired taste through the amniotic fluid and breast milk, great,” she said. “It’s only reinforcing what I’m telling you to do anyway.”
Of course, that’s not saying that this approach will somehow lead to kids reaching for another helping of broccoli over chocolate cake. Children’s preference for sweets most likely evolved because sweet-tasting foods are high in energy, according to research, and their preference for salty tastes is related to the need for necessary minerals. Their rejection of bitter tastes most likely evolved because most poisonous compounds taste bitter.
Exposing infants in the womb to the somewhat bitter flavor of vegetables, for example, makes those vegetables more palatable when they are offered them as solid foods, researchers said.
Obviously, there are other factors that determine what people like to eat. And it’s very possible that a child will never learn to like broccoli no matter how much mom ate it while pregnant, Ms. Trout said. By Lena H. Sun, The Washington Post, Pittsburgh Post Gazette