Do Babies Get Hungry When They Smell Food They Have Never Eaten Yet?

One group of babies who have just recently started eating basic stuff were introduced to some mouth-watering pizza. An adult will have all sorts of thoughts about what they will do to the pizza when they got home. But what about the babies? Would their brains interpret that smell as delicious food if they’ve never had pizza? We imagine we had the reaction we had because we knew it was a pizza. Our brain could do its thing based on that info.

How would that work for the babies?

This can be answered in two parts – how the smell affects you and then how it affects an infant.

First up, what is happening to you (or any other adult) when you smell something strongly? It is well-established that smell is heavily connected to the limbic system. This connection is why smells so often link to memories and moods. In fact, diminished sense of smell is commonly seen in patients with depression. Foods like pizza are often associated with memories and special occasions (birthday parties, holidays, dates, and so on). Not to mention tasting good.

In line with your guess, this all adds up to your excitement when you smell pizza. For you, the smell shoots into your limbic system and stimulates a positive mood and may evoke some memories of other pizza nights. You know you like the taste and you enjoyed pizza last time you got it, so you look forward to having it again. However, this is all based on past experience and learned associations, so none of this could be happening in the brains of the babies. What is the smell of pizza doing to them?

How it affects an infant?

Some of a baby’s reactions to food are pretty hard-wired. Just like babies prefer the face of their caregiver, they have a natural predilection for high-sugar foods. In addition, they start developing food preferences prenatally. It has been shown that foods consumed by the mother (especially during the third trimester) can affect the baby’s taste preferences after birth. Also, in the breastfeeding phase, the composition of the mother’s milk has been shown to affect a child’s tastes. Given this information, if a baby has already realized that a particular smell is associated with something it likes (a specific taste/high sugar/high sodium…) then that smell may evoke an anticipatory response in the baby.

However, the baby has never had pizza. There’s no way for the baby to connect the smell of pizza to any taste or biological craving. They may realize that the other people seem happy, but they may or may not draw a connection with the pizza. Does this mean that the particular smell of pizza would do nothing to them at first? Not quite. While some foods smell quite bland, pizza does not. As with so many hot/cooked meals, pizza has a distinctly “food” smell. Even if an animal has never had a particular food before, if it smells food, there’s a bodily reaction.

Digestion of food: Cephalic phase

Digestion of food is broken into several phases, and phase one is “cephalic.” In the cephalic phase, the smell and sight of food (before it even enters the mouth) provokes an increase in saliva and stomach enzymes. Think of it as a preparatory step so that your body is ready to consume the coming meal. If you’re familiar with Pavlov, one of his lesser-known experiments was to show the cephalic phase in dogs. This is what your twins’ bodies would be doing. They don’t yet have any associations with pizza, (although they’re beginning to build them now), but they do have the “incoming food” response built in like all other mammals.

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