Maybe your baby is giving you clear cues that he's ready to taste what you're having. Or maybe you can't wait to emerge from a feeding splattered with peas. Whatever your reason, there are things you need to know before starting your baby on solid foods.
As I looked at my four-month-old son the other day, at his adorable pudgy roundness (why can’t fat rolls be considered so cute on adults?) I was amazed to think that since his birth, he has grown – and thrived! – solely from the nutrition he’s received from milk. Put an adult on a liquid diet and he’ll waste away, but a baby will grow at an amazing rate and even develop those adorable rolls, just by drinking breast milk or formula alone. It’s pretty incredible.
But if the liquid-only system worked forever, we’d all still be latched onto our mothers (yikes!) or existing on nutritional drinks like Boost or Ensure (they’re just tastier versions of formula, if you think about it). Inevitably, solid foods must be added to our diets. So when should your little sprout begin his first venture into the world of a varied diet? It depends on several factors.
What the Experts Say
The general consensus among major health and pediatric organizations (UNICEF, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Dietetic Association, and the US Department of Health and Human Services, to name a few) is that babies need nothing more than breast milk or formula for the first full six months of life. Until that point, they’re getting very adequate nutrition. Your grandma may advise that she gave all her babies cereal at two weeks old (or something along those lines) and they did fine with it. But babies’ digestive systems aren’t automatically equipped at birth to handle the types of foods that adults eat; they continue to develop and mature over the first year or so.
Let’s take a look at these immature digestive systems for a moment. Babies, in the first four to six months of life, have what’s referred to as an “open gut”: there are spaces between the cells of the small intestine. The reason for this is so that beneficial nutrients and antibodies from the milk that Baby drinks can pass easily into the bloodstream. However, the spaces also allow for large proteins from other foods to pass through, which can predispose Baby to food allergies.
Babies’ digestive systems lack the resources to process foods at the rates that adult systems do. The enzymes that digest the food don’t reach adult rates until nearly the end of the first year. If solid foods are started before a baby’s system is completely ready, it can cause uncomfortable effects such as gas or constipation – which, in turn, can lead to irritability and fussiness.
There are more reasons than those listed above to delay the introduction of solid foods, experts say. According to a 1998 study conducted by a team of pediatricians and research dietitians, early introduction of solids is linked with increased weight and body fat percentages in childhood. And if you wait to feed Baby solid foods until he’s older, the time period between you feeding him, and him being able to feed himself, will be shorter.