Taste Starts With The Taste Buds - The Fetal Senses

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During the first two months of pregnancy, neurons (i.e., brain cells) start to branch off the main part of your baby’s growing brain to different areas of the body, including your baby’s mouth. At the same time, taste buds begin forming where your baby’s tongue will be. These clusters of receptors will eventually recognize five tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. By week 8 of pregnancy, neurons from the brain will have connected with these developing taste buds. But your baby can’t quite taste the surrounding amniotic fluid yet: He or she still needs taste pores, or small pits on the surface of the tongue that allow the molecules from food to come in contact with the taste receptors that make up taste buds.

By around week 16, these taste pores will have developed. By now, your baby will also have started swallowing amniotic fluid. As the fluid flows across her tongue on the way to her digestive system, molecules in the fluid will interact with the taste buds, and your baby will experience her first taste: salty amniotic fluid. The amount of amniotic fluid she swallows — and the number of tastes she has exposure to — will keep increasing throughout the second and third trimesters. By week 21, she’ll be swallowing several onces a day.

What You Taste, Your Baby Tastes

Even though your digestive system is separate from your baby’s, molecules of the food you eat make their way into the amniotic fluid — not only vitamins, minerals, fats and proteins, but also some of the molecules that give foods their unique tastes. The flavors your baby tastes inside the womb, though, won’t be quite as strong or distinct as those you taste. That’s because much of what you think of as the flavor of a food is actually its smell, which is transmitted to your nose through the air. Since your baby is surrounded by amniotic fluid, she only tastes molecules from your bloodstream and doesn’t have the sense of smell yet to amplify those flavors. But even with this blunted sense of taste, your baby will start to recognize foods. Eat a spicy meal and you might even feel her hiccup!

Encouraging A Broad Palate

Research has shown that the foods you eat during pregnancy influence the foods that your baby will like for years to come. In one study, mothers who drank carrot juice during the last trimester of pregnancy had babies who, once they started weaning, made fewer negative faces when fed carrot juice. Another 2012 study found that pregnant rats that ate lots of junk food and had diets high in fat, salt and sugar gave birth to babies who preferred these foods and disliked healthy foods. Some scientists say that the foods you eat during pregnancy could literally shape your baby’s eating habits — and her odds of obesity and diabetes — throughout the rest of her life.

So what flavors should you expose your baby to during pregnancy? Aim to eat a balanced and varied diet, and choose fresh fruits and vegetables over salty, processed snacks. This not only helps keep you healthy during pregnancy, but it also sets the stage for your baby to love healthy, diverse tastes. And don’t shy away from eating flavorful foods that you enjoy and want your baby to learn to like, too: Distinct flavors like garlic, mint and curry are among those that are transmitted most strongly through your amniotic fluid.

The evidence for direct and indirect learning of odors in utero has been reviewed by Schaal, Orgeur, and Rogan (1995). They point to an extraordinary range of available odiferous compounds, an average of 120 in individual samples of amniotic fluid! In addition, products of the mother's diet reach the baby via the placenta and the blood flowing in the capillaries of the nasal mucosa. Thus, prenatal experience with odorants from both sources probably prepare this sensory system to search for certain odors or classes of odors. In one experiment, babies registered changes in fetal breathing and heart rate when mothers drank coffee, whether it was caffeinated or decaffeinated. Newborns are drawn to the odor of breastmilk, although they have no previous experience with it. Researchers think this may come from cues they have learned in prenatal life.