How do babies learn to like healthy foods?

​​Karen Switkowski, PhD, MPH

​It seems that kids are born loving sweets, and in fact, this is true. Across cultures, babies show an innate preference for sweet flavors, which helps them to survive by ensuring that they enjoy the sweet taste of their natural first food, breast milk. Babies also tend to like salty and “energy-dense” foods, and they show a universal dislike of foods that taste bitter. This discourages ingestion of toxic plants or other substances that could be harmful. If babies are born loving sweets and hating vegetables, how can their eating habits become more aligned with what we would consider a healthy diet? 

Infancy is a “sensitive period” for developing taste preferences, which means that babies’ early experiences with food may impact how they approach both new and familiar foods as they grow. Per AAP guidelines, at around 6 months, babies should be introduced to “solid” foods as a complement to breast milk and/or formula. Gradually, babies are transitioned to a diet that is less liquid and more in line with that of their family and culture. During a baby's first few months of experiencing foods, parents and caregivers can encourage development of preferences for a wide variety of (nutritious!) foods by focusing on the following:

1. Variety: Babies should experience (via touch and taste) a lot of different foods, especially vegetables. This helps them become familiar and comfortable with different tastes and textures. It’s expected that babies will often reject a food the first time; this is a natural response to a first taste of broccoli or zucchini.
2. Repeated exposure: Fortunately, spitting out a first taste of broccoli does not mean that a baby is destined for a lifetime of hating broccoli. It can take 8-16 exposures to a given food for a child to accept it - and foods with stronger or more bitter flavors generally require more attempts. Exposure includes placing a food on the baby’s tray or in her hand - even if she throws it onto the floor, tentatively licks it, or spits it out, she is getting more familiar with that food! Repeated exposure helps children become more comfortable with both tastes and textures and may also increase acceptance of similar foods - so once a baby starts eating zucchini, yellow squash may be familiar enough that he will accept it immediately. There are some tricks that can encourage babies (and even older children!) to taste new or previously rejected foods.
   • One is to offer new or disliked food mixed into or “paired” with a familiar/liked food.
   • A delay in re-introducing rejected foods might increase eventual acceptance.
3. Avoiding sweets: Some research suggests that offering lots of sweets and juice to young babies might enhance their natural preference for sweetness.
4. A positive attitude! The best thing that parents can do to encourage their child is to let the child observe them eating (and enjoying!) food. Children will often learn to like foods that become familiar and associated with positive feelings. Conversely, pressuring children to eat is associated with a variety of negative outcomes. 

We recently examined some of these behaviors in relation to children’s later diet quality among a group of children in Project Viva. Our results showed that delaying introduction to sweets and fruit juice, introducing flavor and texture variety early, and continuing to offer refused foods were all associated with higher diet quality at the age of ~3 years, with some differences between male and female children and babies who were breastfed vs. formula-fed.
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The good news is that many babies can learn to like a variety of healthy foods when exposed to them early and often.