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Infants’ and Children’s Salt Taste Perception and Liking: A Review

Sodium is an essential nutrient for the human body. It is widely used as sodium chloride (table salt) in (processed) foods and overconsumed by both children and adults, placing them at risk for adverse health effects such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases. The current review focusse...

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Autor principal: Liem, Djin G.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5622771/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28902163
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu9091011
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author Liem, Djin G.
author_facet Liem, Djin G.
author_sort Liem, Djin G.
collection PubMed
description Sodium is an essential nutrient for the human body. It is widely used as sodium chloride (table salt) in (processed) foods and overconsumed by both children and adults, placing them at risk for adverse health effects such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases. The current review focusses on the development of salt taste sensitivity and preferences, and its association with food intake. Three -to- four month old infants are able to detect and prefer sodium chloride solutions over plain water, which is thought to be a biological unlearned response. Liking for water with sodium chloride mostly decreases when infants enter early childhood, but liking for sodium chloride in appropriate food contexts such as soup and snack foods remains high. The increased acceptance and preference of sodium chloride rich foods coincides with infants’ exposure to salty foods, and is therefore thought to be mostly a learned response. Children prefer higher salt concentrations than adults, but seem to be equally sensitive to salt taste. The addition of salt to foods increases children’s consumption of those foods. However, children’s liking for salt taste as such does not seem to correlate with children’s consumption of salty foods. Decreasing the exposure to salty tasting foods during early infancy is recommended. Salt plays an important role in children’s liking for a variety of foods. It is, however, questionable if children’s liking for salt per se influences the intake of salty foods.
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spelling pubmed-56227712017-10-05 Infants’ and Children’s Salt Taste Perception and Liking: A Review Liem, Djin G. Nutrients Review Sodium is an essential nutrient for the human body. It is widely used as sodium chloride (table salt) in (processed) foods and overconsumed by both children and adults, placing them at risk for adverse health effects such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases. The current review focusses on the development of salt taste sensitivity and preferences, and its association with food intake. Three -to- four month old infants are able to detect and prefer sodium chloride solutions over plain water, which is thought to be a biological unlearned response. Liking for water with sodium chloride mostly decreases when infants enter early childhood, but liking for sodium chloride in appropriate food contexts such as soup and snack foods remains high. The increased acceptance and preference of sodium chloride rich foods coincides with infants’ exposure to salty foods, and is therefore thought to be mostly a learned response. Children prefer higher salt concentrations than adults, but seem to be equally sensitive to salt taste. The addition of salt to foods increases children’s consumption of those foods. However, children’s liking for salt taste as such does not seem to correlate with children’s consumption of salty foods. Decreasing the exposure to salty tasting foods during early infancy is recommended. Salt plays an important role in children’s liking for a variety of foods. It is, however, questionable if children’s liking for salt per se influences the intake of salty foods. MDPI 2017-09-13 /pmc/articles/PMC5622771/ /pubmed/28902163 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu9091011 Text en © 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Review
Liem, Djin G.
Infants’ and Children’s Salt Taste Perception and Liking: A Review
title Infants’ and Children’s Salt Taste Perception and Liking: A Review
title_full Infants’ and Children’s Salt Taste Perception and Liking: A Review
title_fullStr Infants’ and Children’s Salt Taste Perception and Liking: A Review
title_full_unstemmed Infants’ and Children’s Salt Taste Perception and Liking: A Review
title_short Infants’ and Children’s Salt Taste Perception and Liking: A Review
title_sort infants’ and children’s salt taste perception and liking: a review
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5622771/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28902163
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu9091011
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