I think it’s pretty well accepted that children’s tastes run more to things like candy than do adults.
Why is this? Do children have some nutritional need which is met by candy and the like? (Public health advocates today warn against this, of course, but that could just be “too much of a good thing”, as is the obesity problem generally.)
Possibly biological:
Semi-educated guess here, but it makes sense evolutionarily and developmentally. A growing kid who gloms on to simple carbs for daily energy won’t have to burn valuable proteins or fats for energy, using them as building blocks for a growing body instead.
Yeah, the pre-humans who weren’t interested in high-energy food (which was typically scarce before the agricultural and industrial revolutions) were less likely to survive and pass on their sugar-hatin’ genes.
Not scientific in the least: As we get older, our senses dull? Candy doesn’t taste as socko as when we were six?
I don’t know what you are talking about…
(says the guy who stops by Five Below once a week to replenish his vast candy hoard)
I think the answer is likely pretty simple. Breastmilk is sweet, so babies who didn’t have a sweet tooth failed to thrive. There’s no magical age at which breastmilk stops being nutritious, so there’s no reason for a sudden extinction of that preference. Even after weaning, foods that are sweet and easily accessible to a small child are usually* not poisonous, and are readily digestible. Whereas poisonous plants (and meat parts, for that matter) tend to be bitter. So are some very “nutritious” vegetables; that might seem unfortunate, but many of those foods tend to be more nutritious (more easily digestible, more calorie dense, and making certain nutrients more bioavailable) after cooking.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that your average primitive child, brought up with some degree of benign neglect, is going to survive eating the wild grapes he finds when wandering away from Mama. His sister, with less of the sweet-preferring/bitterness-avoiding traits probably didn’t do so well after her snack of ivy berries…or by expending all of her eating time munching on raw spinach. 
Even bitter foods like broccoli that are nutrition-dense are pretty low calorie, and the nutrients in them, like C, are just as easily obtainable from sweet sources, or else they are things like iron, which babies are born with a store of, and which is available in meat. It’s also available in calorie-dense nuts, although I’m not sure if a child can get all the iron it needs from nuts alone. Possibly from nuts and grains, once we started eating grains with the hull.
The fact is, that if you eat a lot of fruits and whole grains, you can actually get along pretty well without vegetables; vegetables just keep a lot better without any special effort than fruits. It’s dogma that kids need to eat vegetables, but they don’t really, especially not that we have fortified breads and cereals. And I say that as a kid who loved vegetables. I liked them so much, that my mother could serve me almost anything vegetable, and I’d eat it and ask for seconds. The few things I didn’t like I could choose not to eat, because she knew I’d eaten plenty of whatever was served the day before, and I’d eat what was served the next day, and there was always salad too, which I ate. Meat was always the battle at the table when I was a child.
The original question wasn’t why a sweet tooth, but why do children have more of a sweet tooth than adults. It could be due to the reason Quadgop gives, that it’s more important in a survival sense to them. But to be honest, I’m not sure the premise is true. I think a lot of it is adult trained behavior. I’d be interested to know if adult chimps have less of a sweet tooth than baby chimps.
What OldGuy said. I know a lot of children who weren’t particularly fond of sweets, prefering savory treats, but their parents kept using sweets as rewards and thus making them desirable. For some reason the same parents never thought of restricting or doling out salted peanuts or roast almonds.
Well, I am 70 and I am sure I eat more now then when I was young. I keep jars around and snack a bit every few hours. Right now I have Dove chocolate bite size, 2 kinds of Andre mints, an assortment of the bite sized Hershey’s bars, and the ever present jar of Skittles. Plus a few Reese’s mini cups, but they are a bit rich.
Dennis
People who say that they don’t have a sweet tooth still like dessert. It’s a paradox.
Desserts (adult ones) often have more complex flavours, such as bitter chocolate, coffee or tart lemon, than children’s candy. That said, at the age of 39 I will clear out my daughter’s sweet store given half the chance.
Just been rereading Michael Moss’s excellent book “Salt Sugar Fat”.
The tongue map you learned in biology class is wrong. Sugar lights up pretty much all the taste buds along with “reward” areas of the brain, on both children and adults. Before sugar cane was brought back to Europe, very sweet foods were limited to fruit and sweeteners like honey (beet sugar came later). Indeed, in the 18th century, famous French chefs extolled the pleasure of drinking sugar water. The food industry has long been aware of the power of sugar. Sweet cereals became popular after an industry bigwig said his daughter liked cake for breakfast. Indulgent parents often offer sweet foods as a reward, and not surprisingly, children request sugary treats. Breast milk is sweet and growth requires calories, but any number of adults in this thread enjoy chocolate and cake, if not Pixie sticks.
As a lifelong sugar junkie, I believe certain compounds found in processed sweets, are highly addictive. If my doctor tells me to fast, it’s a nuisance because I can’t fulfill my late night sugar-craving.