Tips for serving baby porridge as a baby's first food & bull; hello healthy

After your baby is 4-6 months old and shows signs of readiness to eat solid food, then you can give your baby solid foods. Baby porridge cereal can be one of your choices.

Why baby cereal?

Apart from being a porridge, baby cereal will serve as the main source of iron for your baby throughout the first year, and possibly for the following year. Baby cereals are also fairly easy to digest, relatively non-allergenic, and usually well received by the body, making pureed cereal one of the first recommended foods for babies.

What types of baby cereal should I serve?

It is best to provide a grained cereal such as rice, oatmeal, or wheat. This type does not cause allergies and allows you to introduce your baby to one of the new foods (or in this case, whole grains).

How to mix baby porridge cereal?

You can use formula or breast milk, although it doesn't hurt if you want to use water. You also have the option of purchasing pre-mixed, pre-packaged baby cereal. Technically, packaged cereals offer no added benefit other than convenience and tend to be quite mushy, so you may need to add some extra cereal once your baby gets used to swallowing thick textures of food.

After your baby eats cereal well, you can also add your baby's pureed meat, fruits and / or vegetables to the cereal mix instead of feeding them separately.

How dense the texture of the cereal should I make?

To be clear, we should make the first portion of baby cereal as compact as possible. How dense it is depends on how well your baby feels the texture, as there will be differences for each baby in handling solids. Your initial goal should be to offer the mixture with a spoon, similar in texture to applesauce.

If you're the type of person who likes to stick to recipes, you'll be pleased to know that each box of baby cereal has instructions for how to mix and prepare your baby's first serving of cereal. Most recipes recommend mixing about 1 tablespoon of cereal with 2 ounces or 56.6 grams of formula or breast milk.

If you don't like measuring portions and prefer to measure by instinct, simply put two or more spoons of dry cereal in a bowl and then add enough liquid to make the cereal mixture thin and watery. Then let your baby decide. Too runny? Add more cereal. Too thick? Add breast milk or formula.

How much cereal should I give?

Chances are your baby will tell you how many servings he wants. If only a few bites were all he wanted, he would probably turn them down and start fussing. If, he gobbled up a lot, it means you have to give more servings.

If you need a rough number, try giving 1 to 4 teaspoons at first. Be prepared to serve more, as this number can increase rapidly in a short period of time, even over several days.

Why shouldn't baby cereal porridge be given in a bottle?

While the habit of adding cereal to baby bottles is one of the long-established ways to go, there are a few compelling reasons why you shouldn't do it unless your pediatrician recommends it.

• Ready or not. A baby's digestive system is not considered ready to process cereal until around 4 months of age. When he has taken a long time to digest the cereal, he should also be ready to eat it from a spoon.
• Too hard to eat. Offering cereal in a bottle (or even in a spoon) before the baby is fully ready can increase the likelihood of choking and / or inhaling the thick mixture into their lungs. Unless there is a medical reason to give it earlier, it is not advisable to give it earlier.
• Allergy activation. Exposure to solid food before 4 months of age can put a baby at risk for a food allergy in a time which can minimize the risk by simply waiting 4-6 months for the time to be right.
• Excessive servings. Perhaps the biggest reason for not adding bottled cereal has to do with excess portions. Instinctively, your baby knows how much breast milk or formula to drink by volume, and not by calorie count.

Although it is difficult to avoid over-feeding a baby, it is also difficult when only giving breast milk or formula milk. Once cereal is given, it becomes more difficult. In fact, placing the cereal in a bottle is seen by some as a form of forced feeding that can cause the baby to “overdose” calories.

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