Michael JensenMy favourite - flavoured breast milk
July 24th 2008 13:30
B - my favourite little boy in the whole wide world
But you can imagine my surprise when New Scientist and the BBC told me that breast milk can be imbued with different favours according to what the mother had eaten.
It's long been the stuff of urban legend that a man can flavour his (erm... how can I be delicate about this... I can't) ejaculate by eating things such as mangoes and banana but it appears that a mother's milk really can change flavour soon after eating a particular flavour.
In this study, mothers gave breast milk samples before they swallowed capsules containing compounds that give caraway seed, menthol, banana and liquorice their flavour, and then at regular intervals afterwards. Apparently caraway seeds and liquorice peaked after two hours of being consumed but banana (my personal favourite) was present only within the first hour. Menthol remained for between two and eight hours.
This sounds really trivial but it has practical implications for the future eating habits of the bub - they seem to think that flavours being transferred through the mother's milk is important for opening them up to new tastes they will encounter when they start to eat solids.
So it appears there's another positive for breast milk in addition to the nutritional and early immune boost it gives to babies.
But what I am left wondering is who did the tasting? They could have done spectral analysis to see where the compounds turn up but did anyone actually taste it? Now that would be a job you wouldn't put on your CV...
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