Babies Love When Mom’s Milk Tastes Like Garlic | Ig Nobel 2025

Your milk tastes like garlic. And babies love it.

Watch the 2025 Ig Nobel Ceremony here: https://youtu.be/z1cP4xKd_L4

In this episode, we sit down with Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp, winners of the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize and longtime researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, whose experiments revealed that the flavors mothers eat—from garlic and carrots to alcohol—can pass into amniotic fluid and breast milk, shaping babies’ earliest taste experiences. Their work overturns decades of advice that breastfeeding diets should be bland and shows how infants actually savor these flavors instead of rejecting them.

We explore how prenatal and early-life exposure to flavors can increase children’s acceptance of fruits and vegetables, what this means for formula design and picky eating, and the deep emotional link between smell, comfort, and lifelong food preferences. Mennella and Beauchamp also share stories from three decades of sensory-science research, from dairy cows and juniper berries to randomized carrot-juice trials in pregnant women, and reflect on why their “funny” Ig Nobel-winning work carries serious implications for public health.

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Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:38 -  What Sparked Interest in Mammalian Taste?
02:57 - Myths Around Garlic and Breastfeeding
04:41 - Garlic in Dairy Cows
06:50 - Should We Revamp Baby Formula?
08:09 - Other Foods and Other Animals
11:17 - Neural Pathways for Taste and Emotion

#ignobel2025 #pediatrics #garlic #behavioralscience #breastfeeding #dairy