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Have you ever noticed how children screw up their faces when a bowl of veggies is placed in front of them? They react like they have been faced with a plate of poison or, as they might say, a plate of poop. It is a frustration that all parents suffer from because no matter how hard they try and disguise the carrots, peas, or broccoli, children will always fish them out and hide them under the last of the mashed potato. For centuries parents all over the world have thought that this was just their kids being fussy, but science is now showing that children are born to avoid veggies with every bone in their body.

Kids are inherently born with more taste buds than us adults; they even have some on the insides of their cheeks. Oprah Winfrey's resident doctor, Dr. Mehmet Oz says kids have around 10,000 taste buds while adults can be stuck with only 3,000, making them less sensitive to bitter tasting foods than children. This theory has been backed up by recent studies, including one by the Kings College in London, that have shown that children's inherent taste is for protein-rich foods such as meat and fish; however, their taste for vegetables and desserts is something that is influenced over time, usually by parental guidance.

But an extra few thousand taste buds is not the only thing going against parents trying to give their children a healthy start in life, because, believe it or not, there is also a veggie-hating gene. In fact this gene resides in all of us. It is known as TAS2R38 and is responsible for controlling our bitter taste receptors. This particular gene seems to be pretty dormant in adults, but researchers at Rutgers University recently published, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, that variations in the TAS2R38 gene can make children extremely sensitive to bitter tasting foods. In a free-choice taste test that included five different vegetables, black olives, cucumbers, carrots, red pepper and raw broccoli, it was found that children with this sensitivity ate significantly fewer of the more bitter vegetables than those without the mutated gene.

It is thought that children are born with this bitter-hating tendency, not to be a pain in the back for their parents, but it is actually all about survival. In the old days, when our ancestor were swinging through the trees or living in caves, the surrounding dinosaurs were not the only things that threatened the lives of our youngsters; there was also a lot of poisonous vegetation. This vegetation

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