Healthy Food Choices: Baby Foods

Baby food is important due to necessary nutritional value and particular stages of young development. Learn about making smart decisions for your babies diet in this video.

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Food should match baby's stage of development
Introduce foods individually
Fruits & vegetables are optimal

About this Author

Alice Merritt is currently the Campus Dietitian at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She has a masters degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in public health with a concentration on nutrition. Alice has worked as a registered dietician for four years, and believes that helping people reach their nutritional goals will lead to a long and healthy life.

ALICE MERRITT: Now I'm going to talk to you about baby foods, the first two years, nutrition plays a very important role in the development of your baby's health. It's important to look for your baby's stages in development and determining what are best foods to feed. There's a variety of foods out there for different babies, you have things like cereals, formulas if you're not breastfeeding, and there's also a lot of fruits and vegetables, all pureed here, you can see. It's important to introduce foods individually for babies so that you can asses if there's any food allergies and that you also may notice if there's a particular food that your baby doesn't like. A lot of people are also pureeing fruits and vegetables in order to be more healthy and using organic sources and it's fine to make home-made baby food but you want to make sure that you puree individual foods so that you can introduce them one at a time and again, you can make sure you're aware if your baby has some kind of allergic reaction to foods. So important things to remember about baby foods is you want to really pay attention to the stages of development when you start introducing new foods into your baby's diet. You want to start with one food at a time and if your baby resists that food, you want to try that food at different times about 10 times before you decide that's something your baby doesn't like. A lot of times, babies are getting used to new textures and new tastes and it takes them a little while to get the palate or taste for new foods. So don't give up if you introduce a variety of foods to your baby, they're much more likely to eat all kinds of fruits and vegetables. These are all things to remember when feeding your baby optimally.

Healthy Food Choices: Baby Foods Video

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