SC - Babies have taste buds

[RichSCA at aol.com]

I must have missed this thread.  Must have run while I was between Arkansas 
and Texas.  :-)

Just a quick comment.  After having my first baby (a girl) I lived just north 
of the Mexican border in Arizona and I LOVE Mexican food.  I soon learned 
that if I ate my favorite spicy tacos she would NOT nurse. I asked the doctor 
if this was my imagination and was told that babies have taste buds and some 
foods/spices can come through the mother's milk and some babies won't nurse 
if they don't like it.  

I knew that certain diets that cows eat can alter the flavor of the milk.  
Have tasted the difference myself, but I never knew that human babies cared.  
Crystal (my first baby) would have been SOL if I had been born and raised in 
Mexico.  She would have starved.  :-)  

Rayne
     
<< 
 >I recently read that babies are basically born without taste preferences
 >(i.e.: no taste buds) and develop these in the first five years of their
 >life.
 
 I'm sorry, but even though this thread is several weeks old (I'm trying 
 really hard to catch up!) I feel that I MUST comment on this!  Babies most 
 certainly DO have taste buds!!  They have about TEN TIMES as many taste 
 buds as adults have, by the age of 6 I think the number of taste buds are 
 down to half that, and by age 10 (I think, the exact age level escapes me) 
 they have only Twice as many as adults.  At puberty, the tastebuds have 
 reached their adult number.  The big difference is that babies taste buds 
 are almost entirely attuned to Sweet (as oppose to sour, bitter and salt; 
 the other 3 of the 4 flavors that the tounge detects) so that they will 
 crave their mother's milk.
  
 -Laurene
  >>