The Natural Connection

My family claims that I began to eat chile peppers when I was a mere embryo. My German mother, it seems, developed a peculiar craving during her pregnancy for hot tamales. For nine months, she ate two a day at a San Francisco lunch counter, and then I was born-- a full-fledged “chile-head”. Not too bad if your home is South of the Border, or along the Buford Highway in Atlanta, but a real problem in a Sicilian-German household at that time. 

Nutrition studies in both humans and animals suggest that an expectant mother can influence the future food preferences of her child by the food choices she makes during pregnancy. By birth, infants are able to respond to a wide range of odors and can clearly distinguish between the tastes of sweet, sour and bitter.

 It seems that the learning of odors associated with the mother's diet can occur very early in development, even prenatally, and that it can have a long-term influence on the future food preferences of the child. Infants appear to respond most favorably and are more willing to try new foods when they are already familiar with the food’s odor before birth. 

The implication of the research that was published in a European medical journal in 1999 is that if you eat unwisely during pregnancy, your child may grow up to crave those very foods, with serious health consequences. More importantly, if you want your daughter to love schnitzel, don’t eat tamales when you are pregnant. 

It is also well established that adolescent salt cravings are more prominent in children whose mothers suffered from severe morning sickness, with vomiting and mild fluid depletion. They prefer saltier soups and more salty snacks than their friends who were not exposed to mild fluid losses before birth. Whether these children will also eventually have more problems with salt-sensitive illnesses such as hypertension, is unknown.

 As a child, my parents tried to feed me “normal” kid food, like bologna sandwiches, chocolate milk, and canned peaches. But to their extreme embarrassment, I would demand spicy enchiladas and tacos slathered with hot sauce, burgers with Tabasco instead of BBQ. When asked to prepare occasional meals, I tortured my four siblings by spiking their scrambled eggs with chile peppers, until eventually by popular outcry, I was banned from the family kitchen.

 The tendency to resist trying new or novel foods is termed “food neophobia”. Food psychologists have confirmed what every mother already knows. Some people are just picky eaters. In general, fathers are more neophobic than mothers, and children worse than adults. Even by the age of nine, young boys seem to resist new foods more than girls. There may also be a genetic component to food neophobia, leading to entire families who eat the same foods, prepared in the same way, year after year, generation after generation. What is boring to some, is comfort to others. 

With the current national epidemic of obesity, various studies have been done to see what can convince food neophobics to be a little more adventurous at the table, and perhaps make better food choices. Some creative soul discovered that people are more likely to try a new food if it is covered in a sauce that is already familiar. So, if you pour enough Ranch Dressing on any new vegetable, your husband and children are more likely to eat it.

 It is nice to think that nutrition education may eventually prove to be an answer for what is wrong with America’s waistline. But this may be only partially the case. In an interesting study published in the journal Appetite (April 1997) titled "Try it; it's good and it's good for you", researchers presented college students in Toronto with new foods and told them that they tasted good, and were superior in nutrition to other familiar foods.

 Students were most likely to experiment with trying new foods that were of non-animal origin. There was nothing much you could do to convince the students to try animal foods that were unfamiliar. The results suggested, “that emotional reactions to animal foods may block information effects”. Knowing this ahead of time can save a lot of fights at the dinner table. Don’t wait until your kids are in college to feed them fried eel. Some food choices are immune to education or threat. 

In southern Mexico in the state of Oaxaca, they serve guests a delicacy called chapulines—tiny, spicy, salty little grasshoppers harvested in the summer fields. I was offered some once, and mistaking them for peanuts I crunched some down. As I realized my error too late to do anything but swallow, I was grateful for my mother’s culinary misadventure many years ago. Just another experience in the life of a chilehead.

 For more information on chile peppers or chapulines, write to The Natural Connection, c/o Dr. Pauline Bellecci, PO Box 777, Waycross, GA 31502 or contact us on our web site www.swampdocs.com 

©2000-2003 Pauline M. Bellecci, MD