TL/DR

Your baby’s sense of taste starts in the womb and develops into adulthood.

Your baby’s early dietary preferences will be towards sweet foods, both because of inherent evolutionary drive and because of familiarity with the sweetness of breast milk or formula.

You can encourage your child to develop a preference for healthy foods by limiting added sugars and introducing them to a wide variety of age-appropriate foods.

What is taste?

What we often call ‘taste’ is actually a combination of a number of different sensations that tell us about flavor. Taste itself refers to information picked up through thousands of taste buds that reside in the tongue and mouth, but that’s just one sensation. 

The “coloring” of a taste happens through the nose. The texture of foods also affects our experience, for example carbonation of a beverage or fuzziness of a peach. As with all biological systems, temperature plays a role. Your un-drank morning coffee may not be a different flavor – but flavors become more extreme in neutral temperatures. Just as a salty breeze can remind us of an ocean memory, so too can emotion play into our experiences of taste. And let’s not forget about how pain receptors get thrown into the mix with spicy foods.

The sense of taste emerges early in the development of your child’s senses in comparison to senses like hearing, sight, and touch. Your baby can likely sense taste at birth and the number of taste buds increase as they grow. As your baby grows, you will notice they start to explore with their mouths. Their mouths are more sensitive than their fingers, so “mouthing” is a way for your kiddo to explore different textures, temperatures, and, of course, tastes.

Taste throughout your child’s development

“We now know that children live in their own sensory world, with their sensitivities and preferences for tastes changing throughout childhood.” 

Prenatal

Your baby’s sense of taste starts to develop in just the first two months of pregnancy. Your baby starts to develop their taste buds on their tongue. Meanwhile, their brain cells, or neurons, start to connect the brain to different parts of your baby’s developing body. Around that 2 month mark, your baby’s neurons have synced up with their taste buds.

During the last trimester, your baby’s taste buds can both receive and send information to the brain. The intrauterine environment is “rich in flavors that change according  to the mothers’ diet”.

Postnatal (0-3 months)

While the number of your baby’s taste buds will increase into adulthood, it has been speculated that at this young age, your baby “may have a wider distribution of taste buds in (their) mouth than you do as an adult”. Taste buds in newborns are not only found on the tongue, but also on the tonsils and throat. 

Children are born with a preference towards sweet flavors and an aversion towards bitter flavors. This may be a biological disposition, as most natural sugars are found in plants that are rich in calories. Further, the aversion towards bitter inherently deters young ones from ingesting toxic materials.  

There has been correlation between flavors ingested during this time through the mothers’ breast milk and the infant’s taste preferences, affecting taste preferences and dietary choices into childhood and potentially adulthood. 

3-6 Months

Just as your baby has grown out of their first clothes, your baby’s tongue has also grown in both size and number of receptors. This is the age where “mouthing” becomes common and it is also the age where your baby can start to taste salty tastes.

6-12 Months

Some parents begin feeding their children solid foods at between 6 and 8 months of age. New tastes will be surprising, even for a baby who has been breastfeeding from a Mama with a diverse diet. Breast milk and formula are both sweet, and other flavors will take some getting used to. It is recommended to give your baby a new food 8-10 times before deciding if they don’t like it. That yucky face could just be surprised at something new.

While all kiddos are different, many babies will start teething at around 6 months. This will lead to increased mouthing (and drooling!), not just for exploration, but for relief. Once your child has the dexterity to try more finger foods, you can start to explore different soft textures and flavors.

Encouraging Healthy Preferences

We know that your baby has a preference for sweet foods, likely driven by both biology (to find high calorie foods) and familiarity (breast milk or formula). But does your baby only want sweet foods? Not necessarily. While it is true that young children and adolescents prefer higher concentrations of sugar than adults, the flavor choices of children are not one-note.

When children become familiarized with sweetened versions of food – think medicines, cereals, yogurt – they will develop an expectation that foods should taste sweet. “Studies have shown that newborn infants who were regularly fed sugar water preferred significantly higher concentrations of sucrose solutions 2 years later compared to those who have no such experience”. 

Although a correlation, not necessarily causation, the studies suggest that early exposure to sweet flavors increases the sweetness preferences later on. The flip side of that suggests that early exposure to healthy foods will increase the likelihood of healthy preferences later in life. 

Takeaway

To encourage healthy dietary preferences, give your kiddo a variety of tastes – including texture, temperature, and smell. If they grimace at a new food, remember, they could just be surprised at something new. Except for when your instincts  tell you otherwise, try the same foods, one at a time, 8-10 times before deciding if your child likes it. Also, by presenting a wide variety of new flavors, your baby will become more used to new flavors in general.

You will not be  able to change your kiddo’s love of certain flavors like sugar, or distaste of others, like bitterness. Early familiarity and biological evolution are huge and inherent factors in what your baby will want to eat. But while you can’t completely  determine dietary  preference, you can likely affect both enjoyment and willingness to try healthy foods through early exposure to a diverse diet and limited intake of sugar additives.