Model For Sensitive Periods in Early Flavor Learning

描述（由申请人提供）：早期营养可以对行为产生深远的影响：新兴的研究表明，在出生后发育期间存在敏感期，发育中的大脑对环境影响的敏感性提高，包括食物的味道。虽然儿童与生俱来的口味好恶会对健康饮食造成障碍，但对人类和其他动物的研究表明，早期经验会影响这些好恶。挑战在于确定是否存在最佳时间，当经验促进更喜欢健康食品的味道时。我们之前的实验表明，与其他哺乳动物一样，哺乳期母亲在哺乳期的头几个月吃什么会影响孩子的食物偏好。我们建议在16个月的时间窗内对妇女及其婴儿进行详细的随机内和受试者间研究，改变暴露于三种蔬菜口味（胡萝卜，甜菜和卷心菜）的时间和持续时间，以确定对儿童接受这些口味的影响，母亲自己对这些食物的喜好，以及母亲在断奶后将这些食物喂给孩子的可能性。基于先前在人类和其他动物身上进行的扎实研究，这项拟议研究的首要目标是明确时间安排。（具体目标1）和后果（具体目标2）通过母乳中的风味变化，并确定生殖状态（具体目标3）和遗传变异（具体目标4）对初产妇及其子女喜欢蔬菜的影响。这项研究背后的假设，检查了围绕如何将蔬菜引入儿童饮食的高度普遍和调查不足的行为现象，专注于早期生活，与许多其他试图改变年龄较大儿童饮食习惯的研究不同，并关注母婴二对，因为母亲在敏感期的食物消费和喂养选择可能会对影响儿童的食物接触和以后的生活选择。关于母亲应该吃食物以发展偏好的最有效时间的知识可以为婴儿及其母亲，以及他们的家庭带来干预策略。此外，了解母乳中味道的敏感期的时间将有助于了解在生命早期不接触这些味道的长期影响。从这一基本行为工作中收集的知识可以转化为有效的行为干预措施，以促进有效和广泛实施的蔬菜接受。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Early nutrition can have far-reaching effects on behavior: emerging research has revealed the existence of sensitive periods during postnatal development in which the developing brain has heightened sensitivity to environmental influences, including flavors of foods. While children's innate taste likes and dislikes create obstacles to healthy eating, research in humans and other animals has revealed that early experience can affect these likes and dislikes. The challenge is to determine whether there are optimum times when experience promotes greater liking of the flavors of healthy foods. Our previous experiments have shown that, as with other mammals, what a nursing mother eats during the first months of lactation can influence her child's food preferences. We propose to conduct a detailed randomized within- and between-subject study of women and their infants during a 16-month window, varying the timing and duration of exposure to three vegetable flavors (carrot, beet, and cabbage) to determine effects on the acceptance of these flavors by children, their mothers' own liking of these foods, and the likelihood that mothers will feed these foods to their children after weaning. Based on solid, previous research in humans and other animals, the over-arching goals of the proposed research are to specify the timing (Specific Aim 1) and consequences (Specific Aim 2) of the sensitive period for flavor learning in infants via flavor variety in mother's milk, and to determine the effects of reproductive state (Specific Aim 3) and genetic variation (Specific Aim 4) on vegetable liking in newly parturient mothers and their children. The hypotheses behind this research, examining highly pervasive and under-investigated behavioral phenomena surrounding how to introduce vegetables to children's diets, focus on early life, unlike many other studies that attempt to modify food habits in older children, and focus on the maternal-infant dyad because mothers' food consumption and feeding choices during the sensitive period may have far-reaching consequences for children's food exposures and choices later in life. Knowledge regarding the most efficacious time mothers should eat foods to develop preferences can lead to intervention strategies for both infants and their mothers, and consequently their families. Furthermore, knowledge about the timing of a sensitive period for learning about flavors in breast milk will shed light on long-term effects of not being exposed to these flavors early in life. The knowledge gleaned from this basic behavioral work could be translated to effective behavioral interventions to promote vegetable acceptance that are effective and implemented widely.