Learning to eat: Exploring Food Texture, Taste, and Eating Behavior

In this new series of NNI Bites, Big Learnings, we are featuring episodes covering the NNI & WNSC Workshop 103. In this episode, Professor Raanan Shamir speaks with Professor Ciarán Forde about how children learn to eat during the first two years of life. Professor Ford explains that the ability to bite, chew, and swallow is entirely learned — not innate — and that early, progressive texture exposure is essential not only for developing feeding skills and dietary preferences, but also for healthy oral anatomical development. He also draws on data from the GUSTO cohort to show that obesogenic eating styles — such as faster eating rates and eating in the absence of hunger — emerge early and consistently track with excess adiposity over time.