Feeding tips for your child

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• When starting solid foods, give your baby one new food at a time - not mixtures (like cereal and fruit or meat dinners). Give the new food for five to seven days before adding another new food. This way you can tell what foods your baby may be allergic to or cannot tolerate. Delaying introduction of eggs, wheat, and fish later than eight months of age has been shown to cause more allergies to these proteins.
• Begin with small amounts of new solid foods - a teaspoon at first and slowly increase to a tablespoon.
• The first solid foods are dry infant cereals, mixed as directed. Once your baby adjusts to these, you can add vegetables. Then add fruits, then add meats.
• Do not use salt or sugar when making homemade baby foods. Also, avoid feeding homemade spinach, beets, green beans, squash, and carrots before six months of age because of the risk of methemglobinemia (a blood disorder that can interfere with oxygen delivery in the blood) due to high concentration of nitrates. Canned foods may contain large amounts of salt and sugar and should not be used for baby food. Always wash and peel fruits and vegetables and remove seeds or pits. Take special care with fruits and vegetables that come into contact with the ground. They may contain botulism spores that cause food poisoning.
• Iron-fortified infant cereals should be fed until the baby is 18 months old.
• Cow's milk should not be added to the diet until the baby is 12 months of age. Cow's milk does not provide the right nutrients for your baby.
• Feed all foods with a spoon. Your baby needs to learn to eat from a spoon. Do not use an infant feeder. Only formula and water should go into the bottle.
• Avoid honey in any form for the first year because it can cause a type of botulism.
• Do not put your baby in bed with a bottle propped in his/her mouth. Propping the bottle is linked to ear infections and choking. Once your baby's teeth are present, propping the bottle can cause tooth decay.
• Your baby's physician can advise you on how to wean a baby off the bottle.
• Avoid the "clean plate syndrome." Forcing your child to eat all the food on his/her plate even when he/she is not hungry is not a good habit. It teaches your child to eat just because the food is there, not because he/she is hungry. Expect a smaller and pickier appetite as the baby's growth rate slows around one year of age.
• Healthy babies usually require little or no extra water, except in very hot weather. When solid food is first fed to your baby, extra water is often needed.
• Do not limit your baby's food choices to the ones you like. Offering a wide variety of foods early will pave the way for good eating habits later.

Fat and cholesterol should not be restricted in the diets of babies and very young children, unless advised to by your baby's physician. Children need calories, fat, and cholesterol for the development of their brains and nervous systems and for general growth