Another “we could have guessed that” scientific study:
Scientists in Denmark have found that the foods a nursing mom eats can flavor her breast milk. As far as I can remember, though, all of the nursing moms I know were told by their doctors to watch what they eat when nursing, just in case certain things don’t sit well with the baby’s developing digestive system.
What’s new about this, then? It seems to be the focus on flavor, not just the general chemical effect of certain foods (like gas-producing ones). The researchers also revealed some interesting details about the process. They found that a nursing mother’s food can flavor breast milk for up to eight hours. Different flavors take different amounts of time to get into the milk, though, with licorice and caraway seed peaking in two hours, mint in six hours, and banana not at all.
They also found evidence that the flavors in breast milk can influence a child’s food preferences later in life, and that this may explain certain cultural cuisine preferences. It still seems to be an open question as to when these preferences really solidify, however. To my mind (and I’m no expert), there’s still time when a child is moving on to solid foods, so babies who aren’t breastfed aren’t necessarily excluded from the tastes of their parents.
I’m interested, though: If you have a family where one mother breastfed and the other didn’t, do you have any sense that the child picked up tastes from the nursing mom? This could be a matter of genetics and not milk flavor, of course—but I know there are other families like my own, where one mom is the genetic mom and the other is the gestational/nursing mom. In our case, the few places where we all differ in taste seem to align our son more with me (the genetic mom) than Helen (the gestational mom), however. He and I like pickles, for example, and Helen doesn’t. This could be a simple matter of me being the primary caregiver, though, regardless of genetics, and offering him pickles at a young age. In general, though, we all have pretty adventurous tastes, so I’m not sure we’re the best family to study in this regard. Any other insights from other families?
10:33 am
Health and Safety, Kitchen and Food
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Whozat
on Jul 25th, 2008
@ 11:20 am:
I read another recent study showing that babies seems to show a preference for flavors of foods their moms ate during pregnancy.
I think this was newborns, so only pregnancy diet would be involved, not nursing.
The idea is that the flavors get into the amniotic fluid, which baby is drinking (and peeing back out – ew) all the time in there.
I’m 22.5 weeks pregnant now, and forcing myself to eat some green stuff (which I typically would not choose) so little Peeper will, hopefully, make better food choices than I do.
Somehow, “spinach will make her like spinach” is more of a motivating factor for me than just “spinach will make her big and strong.”
Maybe because it seems more concrete?
On a related note, I’ve also read that breastfed babies are more accepting of solid foods (and more adventurous with them) when the time comes, because they are used to the milk tasting different from day to day, rather than formula fed babies who’ve only tasted the same thing over and over.
(Man, that must be boring for them!)
All that said, my partner Shrike, who is Peeper’s genetic mommy is a little better with the veggies than I am, so maybe I ought to be hoping for nature to win out over nurture on this one.
On a more enjoyable note, I’m taking under full advisement the other recent study showing that women who have five or more servings of chocolate (especially dark chocolate) per week during pregnancy have a lower rate of preeclampsia.
Sometimes I just love science!
“But, it’s for the baaaybeee!”
ang
on Jul 25th, 2008
@ 11:34 am:
During my mother’s pregnancies with me, my older brother, and my younger brother she craved super spicy food. And while she was nursing, she ate a ton. We all LOVE spicy food, and have since we were really little. As a three year old I would put hot pepper flakes on my pizza. However, with my little sister she had really, really bad heartburn and ate really mild foods, and she was only able to nurse her for a couple months due to some problems. It took my little sister AGES to be able to stand any kind of spice, which made cooking really annoying.
However, now she’ll eat absolutely anything we do.