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Begin at the Beginning: The Best Diet for Healthy Children
Part 3: Weaning to Teething
Weaning
The point of weaning is to make the transition from milk to ordinary family
food. Weaning should not be started before four months for the reasons stated
earlier, but it should have started by six months. Later and your baby's stores
of iron may be running low (see below). The exact time depends on baby.
Breast-feeding may continue simultaneously for two years or more. There are no
hard and fast rules about this: you and your baby can decide for yourselves.
Don't try to force the pace: the transition should be gradual. There is plenty
of advice literature available from maternity units and family doctors. Much of
this is useful - but a lot is placed there by baby-food manufacturers. This
must be read with caution, as it may not be unbiased.
It is important to remember that milk is a balanced
food and that which follows
it must also be balanced. This phase of your baby's diet is crucial to her
future weight and health. It is at this time that predilections for certain
tastes begin: what your baby becomes accustomed to at this time will determine
what she will prefer to eat throughout life.
Nevertheless, the general principles of weaning can be
followed, remembering
only that cereals should not be given too liberally and under no circumstances
should sugar or artificially sweetened foods be given. Don't worry if these
foods do not taste sweet enough to you, your baby doesn't know the difference.
If she does not become used to sweetened foods, she will not develop a taste
for them.
If you use a dummy, do not dip it in a sweetened liquid
first. Never feed a
sweetened liquid in a bottle. Both these practices lead to a liking for sweet
things and, thus, to obesity in later life. Preferences for sweet things can
cause other health problems: lack of appetite and poor weight gain and growth
as nutritious food is displaced in favour of nutrient-poor sweets; and
diarrhoea and behavioural disorders, most noticeably irritability and
aggressiveness.
Traditionally, the first weaning food given is a milled
cereal but there is no
nutritional reason for this. When a baby is born, she has a store of iron that
will last for several months. As milk does not contain much iron, this store
will gradually be depleted. It is safer, therefore, to begin weaning with a
little egg yolk. It is advisable to avoid the egg white at this stage, in case
of possible allergy problems.
Liquidised meat, offal (liver and kidney are good
sources of iron and vitamin
C), eggs and fish, fruit and vegetables should be introduced as they provide
not only a variety of tastes but also a range of vitamins and minerals. Dairy
produce: full-cream milk, cream, cheese, and plain, unsweetened, whole-milk
yogurt are similar to what your baby has been used to. But they are common
causes of allergies. It is better, therefore, to delay their use and use
sparingly at first. A suggested timetable for the introduction of various foods
is below. By all means add cereal products, but be careful not to overdo these
and steer clear of the excessively refined white flours and cereals, and do not
use any that have added bran. And I repeat: do not sweeten anything with sugar.
Timetable
Before 4 months
- Breast-feed exclusively.
4-6 months
- Can give small amounts of puréed meat, fruit and
vegetables, and just a taste of a thin porridge of cornmeal or rice flour with
a breast-milk (or formula milk) feed.
Do not give cow's milk, citrus fruits, soft summer
fruits, wheat in any form,
spices, oats, salt, sugar, spinach, swede, turnip, beetroot, eggs or nuts.
6-8 months
- Can give puréed meat and vegetables, fish, liver, egg yolk
(hard cooked), small beans (e.g. aduki), ripe banana, cooked rice, citrus
fruits, summer fruits, bread with milk feed.
Do not give cow's milk (except yoghurt), cheese, hot
spices, egg whites, nuts.
9-12 months
- Can give a wide range of foods, cow's milk in small quantities,
cheese, fromage frais, fish, soft cooked beans, smooth peanut butter,
well-cooked meat, well-cooked egg white - at any time.
Do not give cow's milk as main drink. Do not give whole
nuts until the age of
five.
Commercial baby foods
It is important that babies are introduced to high quality foods from the start. Unfortunately, many new mothers are presented with manufacturers' free samples by hospitals and health workers. The manufacturers don't give these away out of the goodness of their hearts; these have been supplied to help promote their products. Jars of commercial baby food are best avoided, except for occasional times when needed for convenience, for a number of reasons:
- a. Using commercial foods usually means that the child's first solids are very different from the foods you will want her to eat a few months later.
- b. These foods also contain large quantities of sugary or starchy fillers. Even those with 'no added sugar' usually contain fruit syrups and other sugars. Many ready-to-serve baby foods are thickened with starches (e.g. maltodextrin) and gums to make them appear more like solid food. These not only predispose to obesity but also damage teeth.
- c. There is no requirement that baby foods which contain meat have either their meat content, the species from which it comes or which parts of the animal is used stated on the jar. One 'Turkey Dinner' that the Food Commission tested contained only five percent meat. Most, today, are only around fifteen percent meat.
- d. Baby foods are highly processed and, as a consequence, nutrients may be destroyed. To make up this shortfall, manufacturers add vitamins. There is considerable evidence that taking vitamin supplements, and that is what these added vitamins are, is not a good idea (indeed, any food that proclaims it has added vitamins should be regarded with suspicion for any age).
- e. Baby foods also tend to be stored for a considerable time before being eaten. They, therefore, lack freshness and are depleted of nutritional quality. They are the infant equivalent of junk food.
It is almost inevitable, I suppose, that you will want to use commercial baby foods for convenience from time to time. In which case scrutinise the labels and reject any that contain ingredients that are not 'food' in the accepted sense, or that you wouldn't want to eat yourself.
Making your own baby foods
Making foods yourself for weaning is not difficult. A whole month's supply can
easily be made in one go, puréed, divided up into ice-cube trays and
frozen in the freezer or refrigerator's ice box to be thawed out as required.
All food should be nutritious. A child has a lot of
growing to do and only a
small stomach. She must have the building blocks for bone, teeth, muscle and
brain in the form of protein, fats, vitamins and minerals. She also will use an
inordinate amount of energy. The most concentrated energy source is the fat.
Don't cut it off, your child needs it.
Drinks
When your child is thirsty, it means that her body is becoming dehydrated and
requires water. Avoid fizzy drinks: drinks like pop and colas do not quench
thirst, quite the reverse, they usually leave a feeling of wanting more. Avoid
also low-calorie diet drinks. Although these do not contain sugar, they are
sweetened and do encourage a taste for sweet things. The 'pop' rot can start
early and quite subtly. I have already mentioned the sweetened water that may
be given by the midwife to a newborn baby. Many baby drinks too are little
better than sugared water with no nutritional value. A single beaker of
blackcurrant drink can contain 6-9 spoons of sugar! The best drink of all is
water. Tap water is preferable to bottled water: the bottled water industry is
not as well regulated and, for safety reasons, bottled water is not recommended
by the medical profession for infants.
Your infant will probably want to drink tea or coffee
as you do at a young age.
But these drinks, at the strengths enjoyed by adults, are not suitable for
small children. However, that does not mean that they cannot be introduced.
Toddler tea should be super-weak: a teaspoon or two of
brewed tea in a cup of
warm water with milk, no sugar.
Toddler coffee is made with ¼ teaspoon of
instant coffee per mug and
warm whole milk, no sugar.
Teething
At the age of about six months your baby will be grasping things and taking
them to her mouth to suck. Later she will begin teething. At this time it is
usual to give baby something to chew on. This is normally a rusk.
Rusks are bad news. They are largely carbohydrate based
and even the low-sugar
ones tend to contain a considerable amount of sugar. The first effect,
therefore, is that newly emerging teeth are bathed in the food of teeth-rotting
bacteria and, secondly, baby will develop a taste for sweet things. So forget
commercial rusks. Use wholemeal toast or, better still, the old-fashioned bone
teething ring. Your baby can also chew on celery sticks or slices of carrot,
swede or any other hard vegetable. These should be cut into chunks large enough
to prevent their being inadvertently swallowed.
As the weaning period ends, milky and puréed
foods will be replaced by
more solid foods and your infant will eat more like you do. Baby-food
manufacturers make a wide range of foods for this period as well as the weaning
period. But beware: carbohydrates - cereals and sugars - are cheap. For this
reason, pre-cooked jars of food are liberally laced with them. Although the
manufacturers have recently been cutting down the amounts of sugar they put in
these foods, there may still be a significant amount. You can expect the fruit
sugar, fructose, in jars of fruit, but it should not have been added. Also look
out for and avoid sugars by other names: sucrose, maltose, fructose, dextrose,
glucose - in fact anything with 'ose' at the end of it. And look out for and
avoid 'syrup', 'maltodextrin' and 'modified starch'.
If you can keep your child away from sugar and sugary
sweets before she goes to
school, it is likely that she will not develop the taste for them at all. The
natural sweetness of fruits is a pleasant sweetness. On the other hand, modern
sweets are so sickly-sweet that she will probably feel sick if she eats one. It
is extremely unlikely that she will enjoy it. With this upbringing and
experience, it is equally unlikely that she will ever become overweight.
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