Public Health Nutrition Editorial Highlight: ‘Maternal diet during lactation and breast-feeding practices have synergistic association with child diet at 6 years’ 

Food preferences are one of the most important factors in determining what we eat. This comes as no surprise to any parent who has tried to encourage a child to eat something he/she does not like. There generally is not much of a challenge for sweet foods because children have an inborn preference for sweet tastes. For foods with bitter tastes, like many vegetables, the task is often much harder because children are innately averse to bitter tastes. However, children can learn to like vegetables and other healthy foods if they are exposed to them and become familiar with them.

The first exposures in life to food flavours happen before birth; flavours from foods that women eat while pregnant are present in the amniotic fluid. Important exposures to food flavours continue during nursing, when flavours from foods that mothers eat are present in breastmilk. There is strong evidence that these early exposures have an effect on the degree to which infants will accept those foods once they start eating solids. What is less clear is whether the impacts of early exposures to food flavours last into later childhood.

In this study, we used data from a large US cohort of mothers and children to test the hypothesis that the combination of longer breastfeeding duration and higher maternal fruit and vegetable consumption during nursing would be associated with high child fruit and vegetable consumption. We found that among children breastfed for at least 16 weeks, higher maternal vegetable consumption while nursing was associated with higher child vegetable consumption at six years of age. However, among children breastfed for less than 16 weeks, there was not a statistically significant association between maternal diet and child diet at six years old. The combination of longer breastfeeding duration and maternal diet while nursing may have longer-lasting impacts on child diet than has previously been shown in the literature.

In addition to the many well-established health benefits of breastfeeding for women and children, its potential role in promoting healthy diet choices in children is supported by our results. In this study, most of the women who breastfed for less than 16 weeks intended to breastfeed for at least 24, suggesting that desire to breastfeed is seldom the limiting factor. Similarly, maternal fruit and vegetable consumption is influenced by many factors other than individual-level dynamics. As such, to realize the benefits of healthy maternal diet and breastfeeding at a population level, it is essential to consider the broader contextual barriers and facilitators that women face. These efforts can help children start to learn the flavours of healthy foods early in life, which might make it easier for parents to get children to eat their vegetables.

Access the full article here ‘Maternal diet during lactation and breast-feeding practices have synergistic association with child diet at 6 years’  Jacob P Beckerman, Emily Slade and Alison K Ventura.

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