Healing with Food Article
Baby's First Foods
Accompanying recipe: Baby Food
How do you know when to start your baby on solids? And, which ones? Fortunately, you can discern by using your common sense and by observing her development. Here's how to provide your baby with vital and easy to digest foods.
It’s miraculous how nurturing your newborn so deeply pierces your heart with love. As you provide her with the finest, it’s pleasurable for both of you. Thus, in order to fully meet her dietary needs, it’s helpful to consider her biological cycles.
As a fetus, your babe thrived only on your nutrient-dense blood that came—as a direct transfusion—through the umbilicus. At birth, your baby’s never-used, delicate digestive tract readily absorbs your living milk. It abundantly provides all that she needs.
Anything else would be alien. Formulas lack vital nutrients and micronutrients, furthermore they challenge a baby’s digestive system. The World Health Organization recommends that you exclusively breastfeed for at least the first six months and to continue breastfeeding for two years.
At approximately five months, her initial “eating” skill is learning to swallow. Let her sip pure water, which is the best you can offer. Water will delight her.
The appearance of her first tooth, coming typically between seven and nine months, signals her physiological readiness for food. Continuing to breastfeed, you’ll slowly introduce other foods, one at a time. This gentle approach helps you identify any allergic reaction to a particular food.
To understand her nutritional needs, consider the composition of your milk. It is protein-rich and high in both fats and easy to digest carbohydrates. Furthermore, it is fresh, unprocessed and additive-free.
Ideally, your baby’s foods will be like your milk—utterly unsullied, with easily-to-assimilate carbohydrates, protein and fat.
Between five and six months, mashed bananas are the one raw food you can give her. Otherwise offer cooked and pureed apples, pears, prunes, broccoli, yams, winter squash, carrots or egg yolk. High omega-3 egg yolk provides protein and essential fatty acids. Favor organic eggs from free-range chickens.
The small, hand-held baby food mill is a helpful gadget for pureeing her food. Or you may purchase a pint-sized blender-jar to use in your blender. And soft-cooked foods may be mashed with a fork.
Between seven and nine months, add to her vegetable choices mashed peas, parsnip and rutabaga. New fruits include avocado, peaches and nectarines.
Continue to offer her new foods, even if she refused them in the past. Sometimes it takes multiple exposures for her to develop a taste for a new food.
At ten months you can start to introduce poultry, yogurt (whole-milk, organic, plain) and butter. By now, she can mange soft pieces of food as well as mixed foods like vegetable soup.
As soon as she can sit up in a booster chair, provide her with her own little bowl and spoon and be sure to include her at the table during family mealtime. Of course, she’ll make a mess as she learns to feed herself, but how she’ll love participating with the family!
The first molars come in around her first birthday and indicate a readiness for meat and quality, specially-prepared grains. Because the carbohydrates in grains are hard to digest they are best delayed until she’s a year and then require special preparation such as fermentation, soaking and/or pre-chewing.
Sourdough bread is an example of fermented grain in our culture, but most traditional cuisines fermented grains. Grains are also made more digestible by soaking them over-night, and discarding their soaking water. This neutralizes their phytic acids which are anti-nutrients. Lastly, pre-chewing makes grains more digestible.
In some cultures, a mother chews a spoonful of grain before offering it to her baby. Her masticating not only warms and grinds the grains but also mixes them with her digestive enzyme, ptyalin (an enzyme that’s not produced for the first 24 months).
Cold breakfast cereal and rice cakes are shoddy foods for any one, especially for the very young. Because processed cereals are heated to high temperatures and extruded or “popped,” their nutrients are denatured and cannot be fully metabolized. They are, at best, empty foods. As infants and children eat few calories, it’s imperative that each bite offers full nutrition.
Do not offer her honey, spinach and soy products during the first year as they’re potentially toxic. Avoid the common allergens in her first year which are wheat, milk, corn, egg white, citrus fruits, kiwi, strawberries and nuts and nut butters.
Also, do not give her salted foods before she turns one because, during this incredible time of growth, salt is too contractive and may limit her growth. Please don’t give her any food with added sugar, flavorings or coloring agents.
In terms of supplements, give her ¼ teaspoon cod liver oil for every 12 pounds of body weight once she is eating solid foods. Do not give fish the first year. Because the very young are most vulnerable to chemicals and toxins in food, limit your consumption of fish while pregnant and breastfeeding and stay current as to which is the most healthful fish.
If you intend to raise a vegetarian child it is imperative to provide vitamin B12 supplements.
Yes, you could buy organic canned baby vegetables, meat, fruits and cereal for your child. However, for maximum nutrition, I encourage you to prepare your own baby food fresh daily. Additionally, food jars contain a chemical, semicarbazide (SEMS), known to cause cancer and genetic modifications. SEMS, occurs in the plastic sealing gasket of glass jars with metal lids and leeches into foods including baby foods.
Your baby’s taste acuity and nutrient needs exceed ours. Freshly cooked food offers more flavor, nutrients and energy than canned foods. If you cannot always cook from scratch for your baby, please do so at least some of the time.
I find that cooking from scratch is more a matter of organization and intention rather than time. In preparing minute portions, it’s useful to have several very small pots. Or, once a food is cooked for the family, remove a portion for your baby and then season the remainder to your taste.
Please, do not give your infant or toddler fruit juice. This commonplace practice, which is only several decades old, is misinformed and has unfortunate consequences.
There’s so much sugar—albeit fruit sugar—in juice, that guzzling it is comparable to eating candy. Sugar consumption, even from apple juice, reduces white blood cell count for the next four hours and therefore compromises one’s immunity.
If your child is already habituated to juice you can wean her from it by diluting the juice with an increasing amount of water or (if twelve months or older) a mild herbal tea. Offer toddlers and older children pieces of seasonal fruit as a daily snack and diluted juice as an occasional treat.
The accompanying recipe is for Baby Food.
May you be well nourished,
Rebecca Wood