Is babe ready to start exploring solid foods? Yay! So fun. And messy. And a transition from just breastfeeding and bottles.
Close to six months I chat with parents, give the ‘coles notes’ version of all different aspects of food intro and then send them on their way to Lisa Hewitt, holistic nutritionist focused on baby food introduction, for the full low down. A couple of sneak peak subjects in my ‘coles notes’:
1. Baby lead weaning vs purées. This does not have to be one or the other - why not do both! I love the benefits of each. With purées, you have the option to get food in their mouth lol, you can mix extra good nutrients in such as coconut oil or bone broth, and they’re able to explore what a blended sweet potato tastes like as its very different than a chunk of sweet potato. With BLW, babes can practise their pincer grip, they can explore what it feels like in their hand as well as in their mouth and their intestines can learn how to digest each way. At a certain point, your babes will lead and let you know what they want - watch for this! With my first we did mostly purées and for quite some time. With my second he was dead set on feeding himself. It took a few weeks of screaming before I realized he wanted to do it on his own 🙄 😳😂, then he was the happiest guy at meal times!
2. Assessing different reactions to the introduction of foods (ie. changes in bowel movements and various skin reactions) and what these mean: this is where, often times, I’ll tell parents to be in close contact so we can navigate through these first few months together to assess what is ‘within normal limits’ and what is not. To navigate through this properly is so incredibly important to gut health and therefore overall growth and development. For example, we want to assess if the reaction is an IgE based or IgG based. Once we can identify this, then we’ll know when to reintroduce the food so as to optimize gut health!
3. Encourage tastebuds to grow and expand: many parents come in having just started solids for babe who mix fruit and vegetables so ‘they’ll like it’ referring to veggies. No way! To a certain extent that’s us and our north American diet brained way of thinking ie everyone loves sugar, projected into to them. Babes are just building their different sense of tastes! Encourage this by letting them taste veggies purely, let them explore what a lemon tastes like separately, let them figure out what a juicey blueberry tastes like separately, what a good brain food such as avocado tastes like! By no means am I suggesting to keep foods separate from intro to adulthood lol, however there’s no need to ‘sweeten’ food in order for babes to eat it. I always laugh as my husbands good buddy’s mom used to feed him cucumber topped with vinegar and call it ‘dessert’...😂 why not??