all true, though when my daughter was small they were saying babies don;t need salt added to their food. So i tried to introduce vegetables, and she would never eat them, cooked all kinds of things, pressed through a strainer and she would spit them out. Evenm whe she was into finger foods, she wouldn;t eat vegetables. One day i said, the heck with this, and dipped the tip of a string bean in salt, she ate it up like it was candy! From then on i salted all her food. She takes after me, we are salt eaters.
Interestingly enough, she became a vegetarian!
I think the taste for sweets is inborn - monkeys too like sweets, and if you ever tasted breast milk (i tried my own out of curiosity) you'd see it's extremely sweet and watery. Don't forget that once, not long ago, people mainly were concerned to eat enough calories. But of course, if kids get used to sugared snacks instead of sweet fruit, they will get more of a taste for it. Interestingly enough, here in italy, kids used to get salty things for an after school snack - a piece of white pizza, a piece of bread and salame, bread rubbed with a tomato and oil and salt, or simply bread and oil with salt. I would make cakes and cookies and stuff at birthday parties, along with sandwiches, and the kids would hardly touch the sweets.
Now with commercial snacks taking over, things are different.
