Picky eaters can baffle their parents. Learn about your child’s taste buds, food preferences, how they experience flavors, and whether you’ve got a super taster in the house.

One of the most interesting things about children and helping them develop healthy food preferences is their taste perception. From average tasters to super tasters, I’ll help you understand your child’s taste preference and how you can help the picky eater.

How Kids Develop Taste Preferences

You may have read here about how babies are exposed to flavors very early on, in utero. Amniotic fluid, which tends to be sweet, also contains other flavors from the mother’s diet. At birth, babies have already experienced strong flavors and this influences what they will like to eat later on. Especially a preference for sweetness.   

Babies are predisposed to flavor preferences, sometimes genetic, and other times inherited over centuries from mechanisms related to basic survival. 

For instance, taste preferences and cravings helped humans when they were hunters and gatherers. Special receptors on the tongue alerted humans to danger, warding them from eating poisonous foods. 

After birth, if a baby is breastfed, they continue to get exposed to sweet flavors as well as other flavors, like spicy food, from the mother’s diet.

Fungiform Papillae: The Differentiating Factor

In general, children have a greater number of taste papillae, or taste buds, on their tongue than adults. This fact directly relates to their heightened taste sensitivity, especially to sweet, salty and bitter flavors. Some kids have a higher concentration of fungiform papillae on their tongue, or the taste buds located in the front of the tongue and middle section. 

Essentially, this greater density means more taste sensors. These taste buds can be sensitized to different flavors, especially a very bitter taste, and salty or sugary flavors, depending on what kind of taster you are.

PROP: The Compound That’s Responsible for Bitter Flavor

PROP stands for 6-n-propylthiouracil. It is a bitter compound found in food. Some people are able to taste PROP very intensively. They have a supertaster gene, or a genetically inherited trait, that allows them to taste it. Kids who are PROP tasters experience flavor, especially bitter, intensively.

Are Super Tasters Picky Eaters? 

It’s estimated that 70% of the US population are PROP tasters and 30% are normal tasters or non-tasters, according to the Society of Sensory Professionals.

Of the PROP tasters, 50% are medium tasters and a quarter of people are super tasters. Girls are more likely to be super tasters than boys.

Experts believe this means that all the taste receptors including sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami (savory), are experienced with much more intensity. So, yes, many super tasters are picky eaters, and fussy about food.

What About the Non Taster?

You may not know if you have a non-taster of PROP or not, but if you have a child who happily eats everything – even brussels sprouts and other cruciferous vegetables – you probably have a non-taster, or normal taster. That is, your child doesn’t experience bitter-tasting chemicals in food intensively. Even if you have a medium taster, that’s easier to work with, using repeated exposure to different foods and bitter things, as well as other positive interventions. 

Salt Preferences in Super Tasters

The positive aspect of many super tasters is they crave fewer fatty foods and sugary foods. For them, a little sweet goes a long way, and less consumption may reduce the risk of heart disease and other health problems later on.

Salt, on the other hand, is another story.  Adding salt or eating salty foods can mask bitterness, which is probably why super tasters have been shown to crave more salt. Given the current recommendations for lowering sodium intake, this may be an added pitfall to being a super taster.

Tasting is Not Eating

Many vegetables are rich in bitter compounds. Bitter vegetables, especially, are the most frustrating for parents and their super taster children. For the tongues of supertasters, eating a meal can be full of potentially unpleasant flavors. For parents who don’t realize they have a child with a super sensitive palate, they can impede their child’s eating, think they have an extremely picky eater, and use counterproductive feeding practices.

The goal here is to encourage children to taste healthy foods. Without pressure, demands or punishment. This is hard!

One thing that can help is to remember the difference between tasting and eating. Tasting is getting the taste of food, of different flavors, on the tongue. This can include touching the lips, licking food, touching food to the tongue, putting food in the mouth and taking it out, or chewing food and spitting it out before swallowing (politely). 

Eating, on the other hand, is chewing and swallowing the food, or consuming it. When we ask a child to eat something new, we may get pushback, but if a child knows they are just being asked to taste something new, it can change the whole dynamic.

The goal is to expose children to lots of different flavors, especially those of bitter foods. We can do this with tasting. This can relieve the pressure to eat and the anxiety a child who has a sensitive palate may feel at the table.

Tips for Feeding Super Tasters

It may take as many as 10-20 exposures (or more!) for the super taster child to accept a new food. So, don’t give up.

You can always kick up the flavor or mask bitterness with salt, sugar, and healthy fats.  Be creative, opportunistic, and persistent with varying your food preparation.

Simple Ways to Serve Vegetables and Fruit 

1. Roast cruciferous veggies to bring out their natural sweetness
2. Add a light cheese sauce, salted almonds, soy sauce, lemon, honey, or spices to mask bitterness
3. Serve leafy greens with low-fat ranch dressing and fruit with peanut butter
4. Let sweets, like ice cream, help you add not-so-sweet fruits into the diet
5. One-dish meals, like casseroles, are a great way to introduce more veggies
6. Add fruit and veggies to family favorites, like oatmeal and lasagna
7. Pick naturally sweet varieties of produce, like sweet potatoes and pineapple
8. Sprinkle a little salt onto bitter vegetables

Resources

• Check out my guides, workshops and classes.
• My book, Try New Food, may also be useful to you!
• Kids Thrive at Every Size will help you set the lifestyle habits all kids need to grow up healthy, inside and out.

This article was originally published in September 2010.| Updated in September 2024.