According to Alan Greene, a clinical professor of pediatrics at Stanford University and the author of the new Feeding Baby Green, children can acquire what he calls nutritional intelligence, which will help them choose healthy food later in life.
A fetus in the second and third trimester has highly sensitive taste buds that, through "practice meals" of amniotic fluid, get to experience whatever Mom is eating. Fetuses remember flavors from this time in the womb and seek them out after birth. This process explains why adopted infants, when swept off to a new culture, years later innately prefer their native cuisine — even though they may never have actually eaten it in the conventional sense, he says.It makes me wonder what other sensory preferences we develop before birth?
