Pregnancy often brings shifting tastes, sudden cravings, and a return to long-forgotten favorite foods. Some expectant mothers gravitate toward rich, hearty dishes, while others prefer lighter meals. Kitchens fill with scents that can evoke comfort, nostalgia, or even nausea.
While most mothers focus on daily routines, new research suggests these everyday food experiences may influence a child’s long-term health in ways previously overlooked.
A team at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research has found that the smell of fatty foods during pregnancy could increase the risk of obesity in children—even if the mother maintains a healthy weight.
Sophie Steculorum, who led the study, said, “What we discovered changes how we think about maternal diet and child health. Previously, attention focused on maternal health and the risks of high-fat diets. Our results suggest that the smells fetuses and newborns are exposed to can independently influence their health later in life.”
In the study, researchers fed pregnant mice a low-fat, nutritionally balanced diet but added scents associated with fatty foods, such as bacon. Despite the mothers’ stable metabolism, their offspring later showed a strong preference for high-fat foods and developed obesity and insulin resistance.
Laura Casanueva Reimon, co-first author, noted, “The brains of the offspring resembled those of obese mice, simply because their mothers had eaten a healthy food that smelled like fatty food.”
The team found that fetuses encounter these scents in the womb, and newborns are exposed again during breastfeeding. Artificial activation of smell-related neural circuits alone was enough to trigger obesity in adulthood.
Importantly, the mothers had to ingest the food; merely smelling it in the environment did not produce the effect.
Some of the flavoring agents used in the study are present in common food additives. The researchers caution that more work is needed to determine their impact. Steculorum added, “These findings highlight the need to study how consuming these substances during pregnancy or breastfeeding could affect babies’ development and long-term metabolic health.”
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