What is the best first food for baby?

What's wrong with baby cereal? To digest grain your body needs to produce amylase. Babies don't make amylase until they are somewhere between 1 and 2 years of age. Traditional cultures don’t feed their babies infant cereal (AKA baby rice). Among the few cultures who fed their babies a gruel of grains, their practise radically differed from what we do today. They are only introduced after the baby was more than a year old. Also they ensure that the gruel was mildly fermented by soaking the grains for 24 hours or more, making them much easier to digest.

Why does this matter? Surely they just go straight through them undigested then? Unfortunately, no.

 

“All Diseases Begin in the Gut.”- Hippocrates

 

Undigested grains can wreak havoc on your baby’s intestinal lining. It can cause an imbalance of bacteria in their gut which then can lead to lots of complications as they age including: food allergies, behavioural problems, mood issues, and more. Is it any wonder these allergic conditions are on the rise in the west?

 

Cereals have very little nutritional content compared with other foods. They are predominately carbohydrate and fibre, with very little nutrients, fats or protein. When you have a limited belly space and high nutrient requirements, these should really be the priority.

 

Giving babies empty calories in the form of cereal instead of real food takes away from what they should be eating.

 

What should we feed our babies then? For the first 6 or so months breast milk or a suitable formula is all they need. After that try:

• Offering small amounts of boiled yolk from pasture fed free-range hens is an ideal first food. Avoid the white as it contains hard to digest proteins that can set off allergies.
• Bananas are one of the rare carbohydrate foods that actually contain amylase which makes them easier to digest.
• Steamed vegetables mashed or cut into sticks.
• Butter and coconut oil mashed into vegetables or egg yolks. Babies need plenty of saturated fats to ensure they have enough building blocks to make brain cells, their nervous system, and cell membranes as well as supplying energy.
• Liver and meat. Babies need the iron and protein provided by meat and liver. Liver  is best stored in the freezer (raw) and simply grated into hot vegetables.
• Bone broth contains soothing collagen and many minerals from the bones. The bone broth is ideal to cook vegetables in or to mash them with. Simply simmer bones for 5 or more hours to get the minerals out of the bones. Chicken frames are ideal for this. The soft meat can then be fed to baby too.

If you have already weaned your baby on to cereals it is not too late to swap what they are eating, going for more natural, nutrient rich foods. Your baby will thank you for it.