An interesting research study appears to demonstrate that poor childhood diet and nutrition is all the mother's fault.

Conversely, the same study suggests it's possible to encourage a child to make good food choices in adulthood even before it's born.

According to research by Julie Menella of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, foetuses from 15 to 16 weeks old show an innate love of sugar by swallowing more amniotic fluid when it's sweet, and less when it's bitter.

Menella's conclusion is that amniotic fluid is a complex first food, and it makes sense to develop flavour awareness in the months before most babies start ingesting solid food.

So, if you want your baby to grow up making healthy dietary choices and avoiding such diet-related diseases as obesity and type 2 diabetes, it seems it's never too early to start.

Monell's experiments have shown that exposure to diet-transmitted flavours such as garlic or aniseed in amniotic fluid influences the newborn's responses to their corresponding smells immediately postpartum.

In other words, the babies weren't averse to them and will therefore be more likely to enjoy eating garlic and aniseed in later life. Some of these same flavours will later be experienced by infants in their mother's milk, since human milk is composed of flavours which directly reflect the foods, spices and drinks ingested by the mother. Amniotic fluid and breast milk share a commonality with the foods eaten by the mother, suggesting that breast milk may bridge the experiences with flavours in utero to those in solid foods.

Menella's study found that infants exposed to carrots, either in amniotic fluid or mother's milk, behaved differently in response to the flavour in a food base than non-exposed infants did, showing fewer negative facial expressions while eating a carrot-flavoured cereal than plain cereal.

Interestingly, breastfed babies were more willing to accept a hitherto unfamiliar vegetable when first presented with it than formula-fed infants.

One explanation for this finding is that, unlike the formula-fed infant, who experiences a monotony of flavours in infant formula, the breastfed one is exposed to a variety of flavours in breast milk, setting the pattern for a diversified diet.

A couple of mothers I spoke to this week seemed to prove Menella's point. One said she completely went off mango - her all-time favourite fruit - while pregnant, and now her 15-month-old son hates it too. She and her husband continued to have a varied, balanced home-cooked diet all the way through her pregnancy, and their son now happily eats almost anything they like - lemon sole, butternut squash risotto, spaghetti bolognaise with garlic - although they adapt his portions to contain less salt than they might have.

Another mother said she dutifully ate shedloads of spinach while expecting her now 19-month-old son, and now he can't get enough of it. On the other hand, she also ate "masses" of sweets while pregnant; her boy is consequently mad for cakes, biscuits and chocolate, always choosing them over fruit.

If you think of the responsibility this puts on mothers in forming future adult appetites and, more broadly, in shaping the nation's health, you could easily be overwhelmed.

What's not so clear is how long these maternal in utero influences last. If you take into account supermarkets' habit of displaying sweets at child's-eye level, and the often irresistible peer pressure that pervades the the nursery and school playground, it's evident that manufacturers' commercial interests, and their knowledge that we are all vulnerable to temptation, start to make themselves known early on too. And of course a mother's tastes have been formed by her own mother, and so on.

Another study from the University of Adelaide found that babies whose mothers eat junk food while pregnant are already programmed to be addicted to a high-fat, high-sugar diet by the time they are weaned.

In laboratory studies, the researchers found that a diet of junk food during pregnancy and lactation desensitised the normal reward system fuelled by these highly palatable foods.

This means children being born to a mother who ate a diet dominated by burgers and fries would need to eat more fat and sugar to get the same good feeling, increasing their preference for junk food. It would also encourage them to overeat.

So, in the same way that someone addicted to drugs has to consume more of the drug over time to achieve the same high, continually producing excess opioids by eating too much junk food results in the need to consume more foods full of fat and sugar to get the same pleasurable sensation, said the researchers.

And that is why we all need as much outside help as we can get.