We don’t always talk about the “bebés” (said in a Moira Rose accent) on here, but I wanted to highlight some nourishing first food options. These can be presented in a variety of different ways.
- Avocado can be offered to your baby as a slice with maybe some hemp seeds or nutritional yeast as a grip. If you are choosing the purée/mashed route, you could easily mash avocado into a purée, like guacamole.
- Beans or lentils can be provided cooked as-is as long as you baby has a pincher grasp down. I do recommend pinching them to flatten them to provide more surface area for your baby to grab. You could also mash them into a patty and serve that in a strip, which would likely be much easier for babies to manage. You can also easily purée these!
- Salmon is a powerhouse of nutrients. You can serve this in flakes or mashed into a purée (think avocado, mashed potatoes, or even Greek yogurt).
- Carrots and sweet potatoes have very similar textures. I highly recommend steaming these until they are soft enough to squish with very little resistance with your thumb and pointer finger.
- Egg yolks are a great source of vitamin D, choline, vitamin A, vitamin B2, and B12. For added nutrition, I like to purchase pasture raised eggs (although it’s hard enough to find regular eggs - do what you can here!). The recommendation used to be to wait until your baby is one year old to give egg whites, but that recommendation is outdated. As long as the egg is fully cooked, there is no reason to restrict to only the yolk. Although, the yolk is where most of the nutrients are contained whereas the whites contain most of the protein.
The advice to wait 3 to 5 days before introducing a new food is also outdated. Ultimately, babies need exposure to a variety of new foods early on to prevent an allergic response. Studies show that introducing a diverse diet in the first year of life can actually reduce the risk of food allergies! Not to mention, this also broadens their diet to prevent picky eating later on in toddlerhood.
Offering a well balanced diet early in life sets your baby up for long term success!
If your kiddos are out of the infant stage, send to a friend who is starting solids with their baby soon. You might help prevent a picky eater!
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