Can breast milk help your baby love food?
Help them become a lifelong healthy eater
Breast milk can help your baby become a lifelong healthy eater.
Your breast milk is uniquely tailored to your baby and, incredibly, the food you eat while breastfeeding can influence their taste preferences throughout weaning and beyond.
In the same way, the taste of your breast milk will vary depending on what you’ve eaten1. And it’s now thought that these flavours are more likely to be accepted by your baby once they start to wean. Research also tells us that the acceptance of a variety of tastes during weaning helps children to become lifelong healthy eaters.
It is also thought that this process, known as taste imprinting, may help explain the continuation of cultural and ethnic food preferences2,3.
A love of garlic, or spices, starts to develop well before your baby sits down to eat their first meal.
As well as affecting the taste, your diet directly influences the nutritional composition of your breast milk1,2. So eating oily fish, for example, will not only help your baby to like the taste of salmon, it gives them a rich source of DHA* – one of the most beneficial LCPs* to contribute to the visual and cognitive development.
All the more reason to keep up that healthy, balanced diet while breastfeeding – it really is food for thought.
* DHA: docosahexaenoic acid / LCPs: Long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids
Worried about breastfeeding?
It’s completely normal to find breastfeeding a little tricky at first, but our breastfeeding guide is full of tips and advice to help you succeed.
- Lönnerdal, B. O. (1986). The Journal of nutrition, 116(4), 499-513.
- Lemay DG et al. (2007) BMC Systems Biology: 1, 56.
- Solter. (2001) The Aware Baby. Shining Star Press.
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Further Reading
Immediately after your baby is born, your body will already have milk ready for him to start breastfeeding. This first milk is called ‘colostrum’ and will available for 2 days after birth.
Essential for healthy blood, iron is a vital nutrient during pregnancy. It has a key role in transporting oxygen to your baby and contributes to their healthy brain development.
