A Mother’s Day Note about Garlic…

The delivery room reeked of garlic—the mom had eaten garlic bread and garlic-laced spaghetti sauce for dinner…and the aroma was not from her breath alone—her amniotic fluid spilled out the smell as well…

In a previous life I was a pediatrician and attended many a garlic-smelling delivery, which years ago had already clued me in to the possibility expressed in the paper by Hepper and colleagues entitled: “Long-term flavor recognition in humans with prenatal garlic experience.”*

A fetus begins swallowing amniotic fluid by 12 gestation, and develops a fully equipped tongue, complete with taste buds, by 16 weeks gestation. Small molecules like allicin, the flavor compound in garlic,** pass easily into the amniotic fluid, so the fetus can develop a taste for it, as Hepper and his colleagues found. 

In a study carried out in Northern Ireland, where garlic is not part of the daily cuisine, a group of moms-to-be were given garlic to add to their food, starting at 34 weeks gestation, and another group was not given garlic and served as controls. Later, when the children were 8 to 9 years old, the experimenters were able to recruit 17 of the non-exposed children and 16 of the exposed ones to enjoy two meals, a month apart, in which they were offered simultaneously a potato gratin with garlic and an equal portion of gratin without. Importantly, the experimenters were able to ascertain with reasonable certainty that, in the interim from birth to experiment, the children had little if any exposure to garlic.

The children who had been exposed to garlic prenatally ate significantly more of the garlic-containing gratin on two separate occasions, though on the second occasion their interest in the garlic-infused potatoes had waned somewhat. By contrast, the children who had not been exposed to garlic prenatally seemed to avoid the garlicky potato dish in favor of the plain potatoes.

A curious experiment, which supports the idea that we have a flavor memory that starts before we are born.

* Peter G. Hepper, Deborah L. Wells, James C. Dornan, and Catherine Lynch Long-term flavor recognition in humans with prenatal garlic experience. Developmental Psychobiology

Volume 55, Issue 5, pages 568–574, July 2013.

** To quote Wikipedia: “Allicin is produced in garlic cells when they are damaged, which is why garlic’s scent is most potent once it is being cut or cooked. It is believed that alliin [the allicin precursor] and alliinase [the enzyme that forms allicin from alliin] are kept in separate compartments of the cells and can only combine once these compartments have been ruptured.” Another example an aroma-rich compound produced when a plant is damaged!