Pregnant Mother's Diet Impacts Infant's Sense of Smell, Alters Brain Development

[Elmore Furth]

You'd better eat your brussel sprouts when you're pregnant if you expect you child to.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 6, 2010) — A major new study shows that a pregnant mother's diet not only sensitizes the fetus to those smells and flavors, but physically changes the brain directly impacting what the infant eats and drinks in the future.

Researchers studying mice found that the pups' sense of smell is changed by what their mothers eat, teaching them to like the flavors in her diet. At the same time, they found significant changes in the structure of the brain's olfactory glomeruli, which processes smells, because odors in the amniotic fluid affect how this system develops.

In her study, Todrank, now a research fellow with collaborator Giora Heth, PhD, at the Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa, Israel, fed one group of pregnant and nursing mice a bland diet and another a flavored diet. At weaning age, the pups from mothers on the flavored diet had significantly larger glomeruli than those on the bland diet. They also preferred the same flavor their mother ate, while the other pups had no preference.

"Exposure to odor or flavor in the womb elicits the preference but also shapes the brain development," said Todrank, whose work was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health and was published Dec. 1, 2010 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Pregnant Mother's Diet Impacts Infant's Sense of Smell, Alters Brain Development

[frazzled]

1. Eh

Any mother who has had more than one kid will probably attest to the fact that her children's eating habits are radically different -- even though the mother ate the same things during both pregnancies.

It was true for my two kids, and for countless other families I've known: one kid eats anything, including vegetables; the other eats only rice and chicken. I'll take the anecdotal evidence over this study. Especially when puppies are the subjects.

[ananda]

2. True.

My mother loved raw onions, which I hated and still hate, and other
foods I dislike as well.

[Nihil]

3. Agreed.

> Any mother who has had more than one kid will probably attest to the fact that
> her children's eating habits are radically different -- even though the mother
> ate the same things during both pregnancies.

Whilst at the extremes this holds true (e.g., drug/alcohol dependency, inherited
allergies), for most of the curve the child's eating habits is determined by the
environment when they are growing up - i.e., the food opportunities that are
presented to them directly over the following years rather than what the mother
eats during the months before birth.

If the study's hypothesis were to be true, all children in the same family would
have the same dietary preferences ... as you say, anyone in contact with multi-child
families will simply laugh at that suggestion!

> Especially when puppies are the subjects.

FYI: The study was performed on mice ... whose offspring are still referred to
as "pups"!
:hi:

[trotsky]

4. Yeah, I suspect this phenomenon is not quite as strong in humans.

But still an interesting finding worth investigating.