My sweetie. Is there anything sweeter than me?
Babies' preference for sugar from birth evokes an innate trait. But don't forget that taste education begins very early, in a way, even in the mother's womb.
By: Le Figaro Santé
"Jujube, banana candy, popcorn,
coconut candy, cheese tart, ice cream
Chewing gum, chocolate sundae
Paçoca, mariola, quindim
Frumelo, a sweet pumpkin and coconut dessert.
Juquinha candy, cotton candy, pudding
Come here, come with me.
The time is now, it's not forbidden.
I'll tell you, it's fun.
It may arrive..."
Marisa Monte sings in "It is not prohibited.".
However, there is one attraction that all babies in the world share: the sweet taste. As the Israeli biologist Jacob Steiner demonstrated more than forty years ago, a newborn Asian, African, or European baby who has never ingested anything in their life always responds with a facial expression of pleasure when we give them a sweet liquid. It's innate. Their face relaxes, they lick their lips. Or they begin to suck vigorously and proportionally to the sugar level. Conversely, a bitter taste inevitably provokes grimaces or crying. Based on this observation, pediatricians have adopted the custom of administering sugar water to babies before performing a painful medical procedure. Observation of cries and heart rate confirms that sugar water provides them with pleasure that alleviates the pain of a vaccination.
Habit or vice?
Could this pursuit of pleasure explain the preference for sweets? It has been shown that sugar intake activates the brain's reward circuit. Many scientists believe that taste has an adaptive function: it allows the individual, and therefore the entire species, to prefer foods that ensure their survival. Sugar (and fat) indicate foods that are much richer in calories than vegetables, while bitter flavors, in turn, can indicate inedible or toxic substances.
Individuals who had developed enough palates to differentiate flavors and "good taste" to prefer sugar would have lived longer and passed this ability on to their offspring. However, with age, the analgesic effect and the craving for sugar diminish. They tend to disappear by 3 months, unless the sugar content in the water is doubled. After 6 months of age, sweet is not necessarily more appealing than salty.
How to break the sugar addiction
If children and teenagers have a sweet tooth, it's because it gives them welcome energy during their growth phase, but also because of their taste education: candies, sweets… By repeatedly giving sugary foods to our babies first, and then to young children, we reinforce their taste for sugar. An attraction that, according to some experts, evokes drug addiction, which also goes through the brain's reward circuit.
The proof? A baby who often drank sugar water continues to love it at 6 months, while a baby who only had milk naturally abandons their innate preference for sugar. However, be careful not to go to the opposite extreme and ban all sweets from children's diets. According to Dutch nutritionists, when parents severely restrict sugar intake, they end up accentuating children's taste for this forbidden flavor.