The Art of Chewing: Optimizing Early Life Sensory Exposure to Develop Healthy Eating Behavior

Eating behavior and food preferences are shaped in early life and contribute to lifelong food choices. Much of the current dietary advice for infants and toddlers focuses on the nutritional quality of foods, with less emphasis on food sensory qualities. However, exposure to age-appropriate sensory properties, such as tastes and textures, are key in shaping early-life eating behaviors and food preferences. During weaning, new-borns rely on reflexes such as sucking and rooting to get sufficient nutrient intake. Around 6 months of age infants transit from dependent feeding with liquid foods such as breast or bottle feeding, to independent feeding with solid foods. During this rapid learning period, the infant must learn to sit upright and balance their head and quickly develop in terms of oral anatomy, emerging of teeth as well as the muscle coordination needed to orally process food. Different product textures require unique oral processing skills that have to be acquired through experience with food oral breakdown and swallowing. These early food experiences shape the eating behaviors that become habitual and are carried forward into later childhood. Early life feeding strategies vary widely across populations but become all the more challenging in specific child populations such as children who received early life tube-feeding and children with developmental challenges are further complicated by anatomical issues and acquired negative associations with food. Due to the significance of early life food sensory exposure in shaping dietary behavior, there is a need for science-based recommendations to help guide this sensory learning to inform dietary behaviors in both healthy and clinical child populations.