Commercial baby food to blame for sweet tooth

While parents may think commercial baby foods are introducing their children to healthy vegetable tastes, actually, they are mainly reinforcing preferences for sweet foods. Photo / Thinkstock

If you have trouble persuading your child to eat their greens, the food you gave them as a baby may be to blame.

Scientists have found commercial baby foods are so sweet that toddlers never learn to appreciate bitter flavours.

Even products which say they contain lots of vegetables are packed with sweeter varieties such as carrot and sweet potato, and many savoury baby foods are supplemented with sugary fruit juice.

As such children fed these baby foods develop a sweet tooth very early in life, meaning they find vegetables too bitter when they are older, said the team from the University of Glasgow.

They said parents should be encouraged to give their children home-cooked vegetables to promote a wider range of tastes. Study leader Dr Ada Garcia said: "Infants have an innate preference for sweet foods.

"Taste learning requires parents to introduce their children to less palatable bitter tastes and keep offering them.

"Health practitioners need to encourage parents to offer home-cooked vegetables to promote taste experience in children."

The study of 329 baby foods found the most common ingredients mentioned were apple, banana, mango, carrot and sweet potato. Green vegetables were rarely used and nearly a fifth of products had added fruit juice. Even savoury foods contained an average of 3 to 7 per cent sugar according to the research, published in the journal Maternal and Child Nutrition.

Dr Garcia said: "A recent study showed that...higher use of these foods was associated with lower intake of fruit and vegetables in infancy which persisted into school age.

"The risk is that while parents may think commercial baby foods are introducing their children to healthy vegetable tastes, actually, they are mainly reinforcing preferences for sweet foods."

She added: "Infants usually accept new foods and tastes well if vegetable tastes are introduced early."

- The Daily Mail