The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Baby

Preparing baby food such as simple purees from fruits and vegetables doesn’t take long at all. It’s also less expensive than store bought foods. With a few simple tips and precautions, you can serve your baby safe and healthy foods right from home. [Read more →]

Baby Fruit Recipe

• 1 cup of cooked or ripe fruit (seeds and skin removed if necessary)
• 1 teaspoon of baby formula, breast milk, water, or infant apple juice

Puree the ingredients in a food processor until it has the texture and consistency of apple sauce. Add more liquid if needed. Refrigerate or freeze immediately. [Read more →]

The best foods for a baby who is just being introduced to something other than breast milk or formula is, naturally, those foods that are most like breast milk and formula.

Foods with a milky or bland taste and are runny in their consistency will be well received. Your baby will learn to suck these off the spoon and his digestive system will be able to cope more easily with the new substances.

The best thing to start off with is rice cereal made specifically for babies. There are usually iron fortified and need only to be mixed with baby formula or breast milk. You can also use cooled boiled water, but milk is best because it adds a familiar taste to the cereal, making it more likely to be accepted by your child. Baby rice cereal is also a great first choice because it can be easily thinned and watered down to closely resemble milk, another plus.

Fruit and vegetable purees are next on the list. Some baby’s may prefer these to rice cereal, even though the taste is quite new and nothing like they’re used to. You may want to begin with vegetable purees as opposed to fruits, otherwise your baby may automatically build a preference to sweeter foods and begin rejecting those that are less sweet.

Potatoes are a great starter vegetable, because they have a bland taste familiar to babies. You want to puree them and also mix in some formula, breast milk or water (boiled and cooled) in order to achieve a runnier consistency. The same should be applied to any other fruit or vegetable purees, because your baby’s first solid foods should, in fact, not be solid at all.

Keep in mind that your baby’s stomach is very small, and so the portions of solid foods he may consume for the first year or so will be equally as small (especially since he should still be drinking breast milk or baby formula). A few tiny spoonfuls may end up being enough, especially in the beginning.

Other Great Starter Foods
All foods should be pureed and watered down with either breast milk, baby formula, or boiled and cooled water.

• Sweet potatoes
• Parsnips
• Carrots
• Pears (stewed)
• Bananas
• Apples (stewed)
• Mangoes
• Melons

Avoid serving your baby only orange/yellow vegetables, as this may cause your child to take on a yellow/orange tint.
Simple Baby Food Recipes

For most of the first year of life, babies get most of their nutritional needs through breast milk or baby formula. But as they continue to get older, their rapid growth demands more and more nutrients. They need excellent sources of energy, proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals. For those of you who are vegetarian, and would like your children to follow suit, special care and attention should be exercised in order to ensure nothing is missing from your baby’s diet.

Keeping track of growth charts of height and weight, drawn up by your pediatrician, is possibly the best way to assess whether or not your child is receiving the needed nutrients. If everything is normal and your child is developing at an appropriate rate for his age, chances are you are doing just fine.

However, if your baby is not being fed meats, poultry or fish, you need to find some adequate substitutes for such nutrients as protein, zinc, vitamin B12 and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid).

DHA is a fatty acid is available in breast milk and also added to baby formula and some baby food. Outside of it’s natural occurence in breast milk, DHA is only found in marine foods. Although it can be made by the body, provided that alpha-linolenic acid (found in flaxseed products and well as canola and soybean oil) is available, experts are not exactly sure how efficiently the body can produce DHA.

Your choices for DHA consumption, as a vegetarian:

• Take an algae-based supplement
• If you eat eggs, eat them from hens who have been fed marine foods

Vitamin B12 is found in foods such as dairy and eggs. For those of you who do not consume these, you can offer your baby B12-fortified foods (infant formula or some fortified cereals).

For quick reference, I’ve compiled a list of simple rules to refer back to.

1. Feed your infant only breast milk or baby formula in the first year. Do not offer her cow’s milk until after the 12-month-mark.
2. Introduce solid foods anywhere from 4 to 6 months, depending on your child’s development and your family’s history of allergies.
3. Offer new foods one at a time, with at least 2 or 3 days between each new introduction.
4. At the 6-month-mark, make sure you’re feeding your baby foods with good sources of iron (such as iron-fortified cereals)
5. Serve pureed solid foods to start. At around 8-10 months introduce lumpier, mashed foods.
6. Avoid foods that may cause choking.
7. Refrain from adding salt and sugar to your baby’s meals.
8. Make sure the food your serve is warmed to body temperature.
9. Limit any juices to around 4 ounces per day, diluted with 3 parts water to 1 part juice.

Continue to breast feed or bottle feed your baby everyday. Solid foods are simply an addition to this.