Free First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson Page A

exposures to persuade them to like a new flavor, and the effects are long-lasting. When seven-month-old babies in Germany were exposed to a vegetable puree that they particularly disliked—such as spinach or green bean—it took only seven attempts for them to like it as much as their once-preferred carrot puree. Two months later, all but 10 percent of the children still enjoyed the once-hated vegetable, even though they had now reached an age of greater wariness. The flavor window is only fully open for a short time, and it seems to begin closing even at the age of four to six months. A 2014 study found that when babies were introduced to a single vegetable at six months—pea puree—they ate significantly less of it than babies who were introduced to a range of purees at four months.
    For this reason, Cooke disagrees with the 2001 directive from the World Health Organization saying that babies should be offered an exclusive diet of breast milk for six months, with no additional solid food. This WHO report forms the basis of official guidelines to mothers in most countries, even though the statistics behind it were mostly from the developing world, where the risks of moving away from exclusive breastfeeding before six months—such as an increased chance of gastroenteritis and faltering growth—outweigh the benefits. In rich countries, the norm is for most mothers to stop breastfeeding, exclusive or otherwise, wellbefore six months. In the United Kingdom, just 1 percent of mothers are still exclusively breastfeeding at six months after birth. In the United States, it is 18.8 percent. The main effect of the official guidelines is to hold many formula-fed babies back from experiencing any flavor except for milk between the ages of four and six months. Here, the real risk is in producing children with limited tastes who will be set up for a lifetime of unhealthy eating. So often, we fail to see the long-term picture.
    It’s not that a four-month-old baby is likely to grow any better in the short term when his or her diet includes a spoonful here and there of vegetables. It’s that waiting until six months to wean is to miss two months in which a child could be tasting different vegetables every day, which would prepare the child for a recognition—and hence liking—of those same vegetables at a later stage.
    The second mistake parents make—and they are encouraged to do this by those baby-feeding guides with their brightly organized charts of first foods—is starting children off with bland, honeyed tastes, such as carrot, butternut squash, and sweet potato. Start with those vegetables that are naturally sweet, urges the United Kingdom’s best-selling author on baby food, and save stronger flavors for later. The really useful thing, however, would be to get a baby used to more bitter or challenging vegetables: cauliflower, zucchini, spinach, broccoli, even sprouts. Weaning guides often advise sticking to a single vegetable for a whole week before switching—for fear of food allergies—but Cooke advocates lots of variety and daily changes to maximize exposure before the child enters the age of neophobia. When novel vegetables are offered to a six-month-old, the baby will often make the most dramatic expressions of horror and woe, screwing up the mouth and nose in ways that, on an adult face, would suggest torture. The hardest thing for parents is to press on with offering the food. “We have to persuade mums to ignore the face,” explains Cooke. Unlike Clara Davis, who wanted to see how babies would eat away from parental influence, Cooke has devised pragmatic experiments recognizing that parents are part of the feeding process. Her starting point is always looking at what parents already do when feeding children and trying to find evidence-based techniques to help them do it better.
    What if you have missed the “flavor window” and are now attempting to feed a toddler who fears anything green? Is all hope lost?