Your Comfort Food = Mama's Staple Food

Apparently babies can taste and smell the food their moms eats from ~24 weeks of gestation. By this time the mucus blocking the nasal passage of the baby will dissolve, thereby amniotic fluid with all the odor and taste generating chemicals from mom’s body will saturate babies smell receptors. Scientists did a study in which they asked one group of moms to eat garlic later in pregnancy while a second eat avoided garlic. Once the babies are born they were fed either milk with garlicky flavor. Babies of moms who are garlic while pregnant drank the milk very happily while the other group created simply turmoil.

There are also studies showing that babies tended to eat more fruits and vegetables if their moms eat it while they were pregnant or breast feeding. Therefore, it is quite possible that your comfort food is nothing but the favorite food of your mom during early part of your life. So another reason to stay away from junk and eat healthy during pregnancy and breast-feeding. I do not know whether it is true for the spice level one prefer later in life too. If that is the case fathers are going to lose their ‘taste right’ at home when the baby arrives, because most likely s/he is going to follow the ‘food steps’ of their moms, thus winning taste majority at the dinner table.

P.S: This is not an attempt to blame women if their children end up junk food eating diabetics. Most of these studies are correlative, i.e. not conclusive evidence. I believe that there is a big deterministic factor at the individual level and environmental factors much later in adult life that could influence the food preference of an individual. Consciously, your mama would only do things that are good for you!At the end of the day one has to take responsibility for their own life. 

Reference: Underwood.E. Science (2014), Vol:345.