Earlier this week, I talked to my husband and kids, who are keeping the fires burning in Ohio while I’m visiting family in California. All of them were aggrieved. My husband was planning to fix broccoli and noodles for dinner. Both boys were insisting that they would not eat it and furthermore never had liked broccoli. Never mind that two reliable witnesses (both of their parents) have seen them eat it with gusto! The standoff ended when the broccoli was discovered to have both mold and bugs.
You might imagine that this was simply an instance of children being picky and ornery. You would be wrong. New research shows that I am to blame!
When I saw the headline on the medical news wire Ivanhoe – “Pregnancy Diet Predicts Food Choices of Children” – I figured it would insinuate that mommy is at fault. But the actual article was much worse. It managed to blame mothers directly in its very first sentence:
If you’re a mother to a finicky child, then you may be to blame for his or her picky taste. A new study conducted at the University of Colorado School of Medicine uncovers the possibility that a mother’s diet during pregnancy can both familiarize the unborn baby with specific scents and tastes and directly influence what the child will later prefer to eat or drink.
“This highlights the importance of eating a healthy diet and refraining from drinking alcohol during pregnancy and nursing,” lead researcher Josephine Todrank was quoted as saying. “If the mother drinks alcohol, her child may be more attracted to alcohol because the developing fetus ‘expects’ that whatever comes from the mother must be safe. If she eats healthy food, the child will prefer healthy food.”
I’m dizzy with those leaps of logic. How did we jump straight from food to alcohol – the kryptonite of mother-blaming? And how many children are attracted to alcohol, anyway? Yes, fetal alcohol syndrome is a serious problem among the offspring of binge drinkers. I don’t see a lot of kids clamoring for a glass of Merlot. In fact, we’ve let our kids taste beer and wine, when they expressed curiosity, just so they could discover that it tasted “pooey” to them.
Read a little farther and you learn that Todrank et al. tested their hypothesis on newborn mice. For better or worse, mice don’t have much of a culinary culture. They aren’t tempted by the toys in Happy Meals. Nor are they exposed to my delicious vegetarian chili. Even in terms of the mouse lifecycle, one wonders whether the pups acquired a broader range of tastes as they grew. Also, mother mice are never told to drastically limit their diet while breastfeeding due to a colicky or restless pup.
My firstborn child tolerates much more spice than I do. He eats chard and Thai curry and Kalamata olives with gusto. My second son? He’d live on candy, breakfast cereal, hard-boiled eggs, Kraft mac-n-cheese, and more candy if we’d let him.
If this study has any applicability to humans, you’d expect to see the same pattern in every family: the firstborn should be a foodie, while subsequent children – conditioned by the relatively bland diet that families often adopt while feeding a toddler – should be pickier. You’d also expect the children of my spice-loving friends to be omnivores, yet many of them are pickier than my younger son.
It may well be that the biological effects on taste and smell that Todrank et al. found in mice have some applicability to humans. If so, it’s heavily filtered through culture. As parents generally know, young children usually have much more restricted tastes than their parents. I, for one, forced myself to eat broccoli during pregnancy even though it triggered nausea – and look where it got me!
Can we stop with the mother-blaming already? Most women consume a reasonably well-balanced diet during pregnancy. The few who don’t are usually either poor or plagued by hyperemesis gravidarum (that’s medicalese for uncontrollable barfing). Let’s not make mothers feel guilty because they failed to eat their brussel sprouts.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
I agree with you that the article is complete crap. Like your children, mine are each picky in different ways and what they like changes so I just try to offer variety and encourage them to try different things. I have resorted to telling them that they have to eat one bite of the thing they think they don’t like to get more of the thing they do like, I figure if they won’t eat a bite of the thing they are not that hungry, but there have been times when they have refused to eat whatever and I have finally asked them to just lick it, just to give it a taste, lol. Of course if we are to that point they have already decided they don’t like it
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About alcohol, those researchers are actually pretty ill informed. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, it is ok for a breastfeeding mother to enjoy an occasional glass of wine or beer.
It sounds like you’re handling your kids’ finicky tastes in a wise and effective way. I might try what you’re doing!
As for the alcohol – yes, and yes also to the overblown fears about drinking during pregnancy. They’re not unfounded fears, but they demonize women whose drinking is demonstrably safe. There was a British study a few weeks back that showed no risk to babies of mothers with very moderate drinking habits during pregnancy. If I can track it down, it would be worth a post. I don’t recall the feminist blogosphere saying much about that study.
When I was pregnant my obstetrician said that stress was just as bad as a drink every so often. Gotta love the wise advise.
Oh how I wish I had known that about drinking during pregnancy, LOL! A glass of wine would have been so nice!
As the scientist who conducted the study, I was so sorry to see that some of the media coverage took a “mother blaming” approach because that was far from my hope – to encourage women to take care as much as possible because what they eat does change the way their fetus or nursing infant’s sense of smell develops. What they eat also “can” – but not always “does” – affect their children’s food and odor preferences. The human research on the food preferences has been conducted by a number of competent researchers including, in the US, Dr. Julie Mennella and Dr. Gary Beauchamp at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. Check out the original work which in addition to being good science is understandable to general readers as well. My interest in conducting the current study was to see whether the odor environment affects the development of the sense of smell and this aspect has not been researched before. There is sufficient overlap in the way mammals develop that learning what is happening in the mouse nose tells us a lot about what is happening in the human nose. Each of us, like each mouse, has our own unique way of perceiving the world of smells because what we smell – even as fetuses – affects the receptors in the nose that convert chemicals in the air (odors) to perceptions of smells in the brain. Unfortunately my study is not suitable for general readers so it may be difficult for you to decide whether it is crap or not. Since the receptors in the nose change throughout life you do not have to feel so responsible for long-term impact of odor exposure in the womb or during nursing on how your children’s sense of smell will work later in life, but the degree of plasticity of early food preferences is not yet known. Stay tuned!
Jo, thanks so much for contributing the back story on this. This sort of media coverage is unfortunately very typical. While there are some excellent science reporters, too much of the coverage relies on finding some sort of a “hook” that will draw an audience larger than those who already care about science.
Even the most well-meant advice about “optimal” behavior in pregnancy tends to be twisted into blaming and guilting, whether in the general media or in publications intended specifically for expectant mothers. When it comes to taste and smells, pregnant women are often caught in a double bind. To continue with the example of broccoli: it’s supposed to be one of the most most nutritious veggies, yet many pregnant women experience an aversion to it. I remember trying very hard to eat it, but I couldn’t even stand the smell. For what it’s worth, before the broccoli blow-up that I described in this post, my kids did eat broccoli pretty peacefully.
Thanks for the reference to Drs. Mennella and Beauchamp. I’ll look them up on Google!