How breastmilk can train your baby to eat her vegetables.

About a year ago I wrote about my favorite benefit of breastfeeding:  how breastfed babies get a taste of the foods in the mother's diet, and perhaps as a result are less likely to resist these foods when they're older. 

At the time we were eating our way through the San Francisco Bay Area, and I was reflecting on how well my son can tolerate spicy foods - foods which I ate through my pregnancy and breastfeeding.  Now, I know that this doesn't necessarily work for every baby, but I do think it's remarkable how breastfeeding can affect a child's food preferences.

A study released last week in Pediatrics confirms that breastfeeding affects "food acceptance," though only if the mother eats the food regularly.  As reported in the press:

“Flavours from the mother’s diet are transmitted through amniotic fluid and mother’s milk. A baby learns to like a food’s taste when the mother eats that food on a regular basis,” said Julie Mennella, of Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research institute in Philadelphia, who did the study.

The technique can work for a variety of vegetables. In one experiment Mennella gave carrot juice to a group of pregnant women and to a separate group of breast-feeding women. Their babies were subsequently keener on carrots than those born to women who had not been given carrot juice.

[Another study] involved feeding green beans to women with older babies who were being breast-fed but also eating solids.  Initially the babies rejected the vegetables but after their mothers began eating beans, the children acquired a taste for them too.

“Babies are born with a dislike for bitter tastes,” said Mennella. “If mothers want their babies to learn to like to eat vegetables, especially green vegetables, they need to provide them with opportunities to taste these foods.”

Sound familiar - or unfamiliar - to any of you?

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Comments

[crunchy domestic goddess]

i just wrote about this too. just another great benefit of breastfeeding. :)

[Julie]

Sounds familiar to me. My little guy loves plain steamed kale, which as many of you know can be very bitter. I ate lots of kale through my pregnacy & while breastfeeding. I attribute his like for this otherwise kid-unfriendly vegetable to having tasted it many times before. He can also tolerate spicy foods very well. My husband gave him a piece of spicy pepper jack cheese recently & we anxiously awaited some kind of reaction. My son didn't even flinch & liked it. I eat a lot of spicy Thai food and did through my pregnancy/nursing. I'm sure his exposure to these foods before he actually ate them gave him a "taste" for the diet that was soon to come.

[Renata]

I have only had time to look at the abstract to the Pediatrics article. This doesn't look like something to get excited about. The evidence is too weak. For starters, the sample size is too small. Maybe there were 20 breastfed babies overall? I just don't think that is big enough to claim that this supports the idea that you can train your kids to eat their fruits and vegetables by eating a lot of them when breastfeeding. Neither is it enough to call this "another great benefit" to breastfeeding. There may be other studies that support that, but this is not the one. Actually, the abstract's conclusion says:

"Breastfeeding confers an advantage in *initial* acceptance of a food, but only if mothers eat the food regularly. Once weaned, infants who receive *repeated dietary exposure* to a food eat more of it and may learn to like its flavor. However, because infants innately display facial expressions of distaste in response to certain flavors, caregivers may hesitate to continue offering these foods. Mothers should be encouraged to provide their infants with repeated opportunities to taste fruits and vegetables and should focus not only on their infants' facial expressions but also on their willingness to continue feeding." (emphasis mine)

What I read here is that it is the repeated exposure to fruits and vegetables that ultimately lead to a child's acceptance of that food, not breastfeeding. The study's breastfed babies liked them first, but in the end it evened out.