Help Your Baby Develop Their Sense Of Taste With These Easy Activities

Taste and smell play such a big part in our eating habits. Introduce your child to different tastes and watch their palate open up.
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Research indicates that the flavours in a mother's diet get passed along in the breast milk, and the babies take note of this. Early exposure to these additional flavours and smell may help babies develop preferences for healthy foods later.

A study by Mennella et al 2001 supports a more fundamental idea that babies begin learning about food flavours long before they start eating solid foods.

Try these experiments at home for your babies and toddlers and have fun exploring what taste they enjoy.  

 Here is what you will need:

 5 or 6 pureed foods for babies and small bites of food for toddlers. Examples: banana, spinach, apples, oranges, blueberries, bread, cheesy pasta or crackers and such items with varied taste).

There is a risk of choking so do make sure you are watching your child at all the time. Use only soft foods or purees for babies with no teeth. 

Steps:

  • Place the first food in your child’s mouth. For babies, help them with a spoonful of puree and for toddlers ask them to close their eyes and nose and place the food in their mouth.

  • You can also get babies little food feeder. These are easy to use and babies love it. But you don’t have to use it if your baby doesn’t like it.
  • Look at your baby’s expressions when they taste their food. Tell your baby what food they are tasting and describe the flavour to them. For example, “you’re eating a banana, it is sweet.” Ask your toddler to guess what food is in their mouth. Let them guess first what type of taste it is and teach team about various tastes  

  • Tell them about the 5 tastes- Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Salty and Savoury
  • Repeat all the foods.  Ask your toddlers to unplug their nose and repeat steps 2-6. Was it easier to identify the fruit without their noses plugged? You can study your baby’s expressions to find out which food they loved and which ones they didn’t. Toddlers will be more active in telling you which their favourite food is.

In the next experiment, you can try to mix the flavours that they didn’t like with something that they did like.

For example, my baby didn’t like the spinach puree I made but loved the banana so next time I mixed and blended the spinach and banana and for sure he enjoyed it. Experiment with various flavours and textures. This experiment will not only teach how the sense of smell affects the flavour of foods. They will be able to tell from the texture and taste whether they like it or not.

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