I didn’t even realize, when I scheduled yesterday’s post, that this week is Baby Food Week.  How perfect!  I suspect that I may have stepped on some toes – if I stepped on yours, I’m sorry!  Please understand that it is not my intention with yesterday’s post, or today’s, to judge anyone for doing the best they knew to do!  (The best we know is just that – the best we know.  Also, extenuating circumstances are what they are.)  My intention is to get information out there that moms and doctors may not have otherwise seen, and to get people thinking about views that are different from the mainstream.

With all that out of the way, let’s talk about the next step after breastfeeding – solid foods!  Regardless of when you choose to begin introducing solids (views on that very widely, but I’ve yet to see any solid  – no pun intended – reasoning for starting solids before about six months), you will have to decide which foods to introduce first.  In our culture, the accepted norm is cereals, but let’s think about that.

Common sense would suggest that whatever is in breastmilk is something a baby’s gut is prepared to digest.  Of what is breastmilk primarily comprised?  Protein and fat – and some simple sugars.  Cereals are complex carbohydrates – the one macronutrient that it not a significant component of breastmilk.  After cereals, we usually move on to vegetables, and then fruits – also primarily carbohydrates.

The foods we are told are hardest to digest – meats and dairy – are actually closest in composition to breastmilk.  Interestingly enough, in traditional cultures, these are the typical first foods!  According to some sources, babies aren’t ready to digest complex carbs until the molars come in.  That can be several years later than we typically introduce them.

Now, the tricky thing is that meat is, obviously, harder to chew than, say, bananas.  In many traditional cultures, mamas would chew up liver, then spit it out to feed it to their babies.  That has the added advantage of introducing extra digestive enzymes from the get-go, but it isn’t very palatable to our modern senses!  A food mill might be a more tolerable modern option. 🙂

I have to admit that I hadn’t read or thought about any of this before my last baby was eating solid food, so we followed a pretty conventional course with her.  But Livia is more likely to start solids with beef than with rice cereal.