Sowing the Seeds of Taste? A Novel Approach to Investigate the Impact of Early Sweet Exposure on Children's Dietary Taste Patterns from 12 to 36 Mo

Background: Early food experiences shape children's eating behavior. Whether initiating complementary feeding (CF) with sweet-tasting foods impacts the taste of later dietary patterns remains unknown. This study combined a quantitative taste intensity database with dietary assessment methods to investigate this. Objectives: This study aims to investigate whether initiating CF in infants with sweet compared with neutral-tasting foods leads to different dietary taste patterns at 12–36 mo. Methods: A total of 246 Dutch infants (age 20.2 ± 1.8 wk, 129 girls) participated in an randomized control trial; they received either sweet-tasting (n = 125) or neutral-tasting (n = 121) fruit and vegetable purees during the first 15 d of initial CF. Dietary intake was assessed at 12, 18, 24, and 36 mo using 3 24-h recalls. Reported foods (n = 1277) were grouped into 5 clusters—"sour-sweet," “sweet-fatty,” "fatty-salty," “fatty,” and “neutral” tasting foods—based on their taste intensity values using K-means clustering. Dietary taste patterns were calculated as the average daily intake of energy (%kcal) and weight (%grams) from each taste cluster and compared between intervention groups. Results: Overall, children's energy intake from neutral-tasting foods decreased from 61% ± 11% at 12 mo to 44% ± 12% at 36 mo (P < 0.001). Weight intake from neutral foods also declined (from 74% ± 9% to 62% ± 13%, P < 0.001). Conversely, children's energy intake from sweet-fatty, fatty-salty, and fatty foods increased significantly over the study period (from 12% ± 7% to 21% ± 10%, from 8% ± 6% to 13% ± 7%, and from 7% ± 5% to 11% ± 6%, respectively, all P ≤ 0.01). No differences were observed between the 2 intervention groups. Conclusions: Overall, children's diets became more diverse and intense in taste but exposure to sweet taste during early CF did not influence the dietary taste patterns in later childhood. Trial registration number: This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT03348176.