Undeveloped taste buds?

[vpalmer]

My SIL told me that kids do not develop their taste buds until they are older? Is this true?

I ask this question because I am trying really hard to instill good eating habits with my DD. I make all my baby food and try to expose her to all types of food other than just the "basic" foods. Eva has done great and will eat anything. Anyway, my SIL proclaims that her kids (6 and 8) would eat a variety of foods when they were little but are picky now because their taste buds don't fully develop until they are older?

What do you guys think?

Veronica
Mom to Eva
Born on 6-12-03

[COElizabeth]

I think they definitely change. We know, for example, that toddlers will sometimes eat nasty-tasting things like bathroom cleaner, whereas an older child would probably not. As far as getting kids to eat different foods, though, changing taste buds can be good. My sister is always urging her kids to try a food they don't like. She tells them, "Your taste buds are changing. You might like it now." Sure enough, the other day my nephew agreed to try some new food and discovered that he does like it now. Now he urges his 2 year old sister to try new things, too.

Elizabeth, Mom to James, 9-20-02

[malie]

Taste buds are present at birth (studies among other animals have even found that before birth a bitter taste will cause the animal to move away from the substance). However that doesn't mean that our prefences for different "tastes" don't change as we age. It doesn't always have anything to do with the things now tasting different then they did when we were younger but our own desire to eat things that taste one way or another and the memories we associate with it. Taste and food preference isn't just about whether it is sweet, sour, bitter or salty. The smell of the food, the texture of the food, our associations of it, all come into play as we get older and more "mature" tastes. If you think about a food that you've eat that later disagreed with you or that you were sick and ate as a child, often times we that food no longer tastes right to us because we associate it with unpleasant experience. The smell of an apple pie baking might make it tastier then just the apple pie itself (think about how food tastes when you have a stuffed nose). So yes our food preferences change and mature as we get older but it might have little to do with the actual taste buds in our mouth

By feeding children a variety of different tastes and textures and smells, we encourage them to try new things. That doesn't mean that they won't go thru some picky food days or only want one thing or another but it does mean that we are at least trying to start a habit of trying different things

[ralu]

As far as I know, it's exactly the opposite: as we age, part of our taste buds die. That's supposed to be one of the reasons adults prefer stronger, spicier, more sophisticated tastes, as opposed to children who seem easier to satisfy with plain tastes.

Raluca