Pregnancy diet prevents fussy children

What a woman eats during pregnancy and breast feeding can significantly influence the type of food that her baby will prefer when being weaned, a series of studies has found. Scientists say mothers who regularly eat vegetables while pregnant can help to prevent their children from becoming fussy eaters late on, as babies learn about food flavours as early as in the womb, the Independent reported. In order to influence young children to eat healthy green vegetables rather than sweet, fatty food, mothers should realise that it’s important to eat well themselves, scientists said. “Even before a child eats their first mouthful of food, they are learning about flavour through the amniotic fluid in the womb, and later through their mother’s milk,” the paper quoted Julie Mennella, a developmental biologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia as saying. The message is, eat the healthy food that you enjoy and when the baby is old enough to start weaning, they will already be familiar with those flavours, she told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston. One study involving 46 babies aged between six months and a year found that those whose mothers drank carrot juice regularly while pregnant or during the first three months of breast feeding ate almost twice as much carrot-flavoured cereal as those whose mothers did not drink carrot juice. Even bottle-fed babies can quickly learn to like the taste of vegetables if they are exposed to the flavour while weaning. In the space of just eight days, weaning babies will increase their consumption of green beans by more than a half if they are regularly given the food, the scientists said. From : ANI