Baby Blog

My husband is paranoid about giving our baby boy spicy food. We enjoy a lot of herbs, spices and sauces on our food and now the little one is off the bottle, shouldn’t he enjoy them too?  The more research I do (and look for something anything for my banana obsessed child to eat) the more I find, a little spice is really okay. The solid food for babies rules are changing.

So according to the folks over at babycenter.com, the tasteless solids we feed babies in America are nothing like the little ones in the rest of the world are enjoying. There is no scientific fact or particular health reason to avoid spicy or flavor rich food when feeding babies. Rather, it seems the more spices and flavors a baby tries, the more open minded and less fussy their food preferences will be.

You can add cumin and curry powder to squash and mash potatoes, feed your child savory rice instead of boring rice cereal and sprinkle a little paprika and garlic on those eggs. They say breastfed babies are especially used to such a rich variety of flavors and resorting to boring blandness after weaning is one reason children become fussy about their food.

Babies can eat the same as their parents so don’t waste time looking for baby friendly foods. Whatever you are cooking for dinner you can make into baby size pieces for your little one. Besides introducing a wide variety of foods, this will help your child get used to the way you cook making things easier for you as they grow.

Mixing up the colors with baby’s food is important as different colored foods provide different vitamins and minerals. Baby Nik likes to eat yellow food because bananas are yellow and he laughs hysterically when we put another color in front of him but we’re working on introducing one new color at a time. Its slow work but its better than having him eat bananas and vanilla yoghurt for the rest of his life.

So as they explain the new finds in solid food feeding, the old rules still apply. They include not feeding a baby junk food. No salty or sugary foods are good for baby. They can make them feel artificially full and deprive them of nutrition. Avoid saturated fats, introduce one food at a time and keep the pressure off baby are all still good rules to feed by.

Right now I’m realizing my formerly breast fed baby is turning into his parents: a fussy slow eater. Aaahh karma. We are taking it one day at a time and focusing on nutrition and quality of food over anything else right now. Baby Nik is working on realizing that all food is not yellow and shaped like a banana.

We all have work to do.