Researchers in the North East have found that babies react in the womb to what their mothers eat.
For the first time, scientists recorded evidence that babies react differently to various smells and tastes while in the womb by recording their facial expressions, and it has been found that they grimace when they taste and smell greens, but smile for carrots. 4D ultrasounds scans were taken by Durham University of 100 pregnant women to study how their unborn babies responded after being exposed to flavours of foods eaten.
Experts looked at how the babies reacted to either kale or carrot flavours shortly after they had been ingested. Foetuses exposed to carrot showed more "laughter-face" kale induced more "cry-face" responses.
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Durham University's Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab has said that their findings could further understanding of how human taste and smell receptors develop. They also believe that what is eaten during pregnancy could influence babies' taste preferences after birth and might have implications for establishing healthy eating habits, with it being thought that foetuses experience flavour by inhaling and swallowing amniotic fluid in the womb.
Beyza Ustun, the postgraduate who led the research, said: "A number of studies have suggested that babies can taste and smell in the womb, but they are based on post-birth outcomes while our study is the first to see these reactions prior to birth. As a result, we think that this repeated exposure to flavours before birth could help to establish food preferences post-birth, which could be important when thinking about messaging around healthy eating and the potential for avoiding ‘food-fussiness’ when weaning.
"It was really amazing to see unborn babies’ reaction to kale or carrot flavours during the scans and share those moments with their parents."
Mothers were scanned at 32 and 36 weeks of pregnancy to see foetal facial reactions to the kale and carrot flavours. They were given a single capsule containing approximately 400mg of carrot of 400mg kale powder around 20 minutes before each scan and did not consume anything with a flavour for an hour before.
Facial reactions were seen in both flavour groups, compared with foetuses in a control group not exposed to either flavour, showing that exposure to just a small amount of carrot or kale flavour was enough to stimulate a reaction.
Professor Nadja Reissland, who heads up the Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab and is the study's co-author, has previously studied 4D scans to show the impact of smoking during pregnancy. She said: "This latest study could have important implications for understanding the earliest evidence for foetal abilities to sense and discriminate different flavours and smells from the foods ingested by their mothers."
Jackie Blissett of Aston University, research co-author, said: "“It could be argued that repeated prenatal flavour exposures may lead to preferences for those flavours experienced postnatally. In other words, exposing the foetus to less ‘liked’ flavours, such as kale, might mean they get used to those flavours in utero.
"The next step is to examine whether foetuses show less ‘negative’ responses to these flavours over time, resulting in greater acceptance of those flavours when babies first taste them outside of the womb."
The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.
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