A friend of mine swears her penchant for malted milkshakes is due to her mom’s daily consumption of them when she was pregnant. And many people trace their love (or dislike) of spicy food back to the Mexican food Mom ate while she was breastfeeding. Although we know many of our food preferences originate in childhood, is there any truth to the notion that a woman’s diet during pregnancy or breastfeeding affects her child’s future food preferences? In other words, will a spinach-eating mama produce a spinach-loving baby?
The Straight Talk
It’s safe to say that the food we’re raised on is often the food we like, if for no other reason than it’s what we’re accustomed to. Food preferences are largely cultural. Yet studies have shown that women can pass on flavor preferences to their children, both in utero and through breast milk. These preferences condition a child toward certain foods and perhaps once served an evolutionary purpose.
Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center did one of the best studies on this subject in 2000. They assigned forty-six women to three different groups. One group of women drank carrot juice during the last trimester of pregnancy and water during lactation; another group drank water during the last trimester and carrot juice during lactation; the last group drank water throughout.
After the children were born, researchers fed them two cereal concoctions, one made with carrot juice and one made with water. They watched and measured how much cereal the babies ate and filmed their reactions. Infants exposed to carrot juice while breastfeeding or in the womb ate more of the carrot-flavored cereal than the unexposed babies did. When they watched the babies’ faces, the water-only infants made negative faces while eating the carrot-flavored cereal, while the carrot-exposed babies goo’d and gah’d like normal.
Other research has supported this conclusion, finding that flavors are able to pass through amniotic fluid to the fetus and through breast milk to an infant. For instance, a study done in France indicated that the children of mothers who consumed an anise-flavored drink while breastfeeding were less averse to anise flavor than other kids were. Similar research has shown that other aromatic flavors—like onion, garlic, and vanilla—show up in breast milk and can give children a preference for those flavors. What a mom eats can flavor her breast milk for up to eight hours, so regular consumption of these foods is likely to have the biggest effect.
