Eating behaviors evolve during the first years of life as biological and behavioral processes directed towards meeting requirements for health and growth. For the vast majority of human history, food scarcity has constituted a major threat to survival, and human eating behavior and child feeding practices have evolved in response to this threat. Because infants are born into a wide variety of cultures and cuisines, they come equipped as young omnivores with a set of behavioral predispositions that allow them to learn to accept the foods made available to them. During historical conditions of scarcity, family life and resources were devoted to the procurement and preparation of foods, which are often low in energy, nutrients, and palatability. In sharp contrast, today in non-Third World countries children’s eating habits develop under unprecedented conditions of dietary abundance, where palatable, inexpensive, ready-to-eat foods are readily available.

In this review, we describe factors shaping the development of children’s food preferences and eating behaviors during the first years of life, in order to provide insight into how growing up in current conditions of dietary abundance can promote patterns of food intake which contribute to accelerated weight gain and overweight. In particular, we focus on describing children’s predispositions and parents’ child feeding practices. We will see that the feeding practices that evolved across human history as effective parental responses to the threat of food scarcity, can, when combined with infants’ unlearned preferences and predispositions, actually promote overeating and overweight in our current eating environments. In addition to the relatively recent changes in our eating environments, concurrent reductions in opportunities for physical activity undoubtedly also contribute to positive energy balance and obesity, but are outside the scope of this article.