ExecutiveChronicles | Healthy Or Harmful? 5 Foods You Should Never Give To A Baby | This article discusses food products dedicated to babies and toddlers. Manufacturers tempt us with slogans like “the best for your baby,” “contains vitamins and calcium for strong bones” and other marketing tricks. But the fact that the label says “product for children” or “from 4 months” does not exempt us from taking a closer look at its composition. And here you may be a little surprised when you see sugar and artificial flavors in baby porridge – is it really the “best for your child” product?
Unfortunately, food intended for children often has inferior ingredients to regular “adult” products. That’s why we encourage you to serve home-cooked meals from the beginning of expanding your baby’s diet, prepared from unprocessed ingredients.
We’ve come up with a list of five products you shouldn’t give to your little one.
1. Fruit Porridge With Sugar
Fruit porridges are often simply instant porridges with a small (1-2%) addition of powdered fruit, sugar, and flavor. Instead, you can cook regular cereal porridge (oat, millet, semolina, etc.) and add fresh fruit and berries to them. You can use baby porridge with a good composition or regular porridge. If you don’t have fresh fruit on hand, add frozen fruit.
2. Yogurt Desserts For Babies
Such products are advertised as a great source of calcium in the diet and vitamins “for healthy and strong bones,” but they contain a lot of unnecessary substances (e.g. sugar, starch, juices, and flavors). Additionally, they are not stored in refrigerators, but on store shelves. Why? These are usually heat-treated yogurts. Such a product is devoid of the most important yogurt property, probiotic bacteria, but it can be stored at room temperature. Therefore, a less processed version of yogurt, i.e. plain natural yogurt with fresh fruit, will always be a better choice.
3. Sausages For Children
Sausages, cold cuts, and other processed and smoked products should not be on your child’s plate until the age of 3 years. Not only because they contain large amounts of fat, salt, sugar, and preservatives and are highly processed products, but primarily because sausages and cold meats have been recognized as carcinogenic to humans.
4. Cookies For Babies
Cookies advertised as “supporting infant development” or “helping during teething” shouldn’t appeal to you. Firstly, these are products with a high content of added sugar. Secondly, babies should receive more nutritious food to develop properly. The manufacturer assures us about the content of vitamins and minerals. But the vitamins added to butter cookies and biscuits cannot be compared to the vitamins naturally contained in unprocessed foods, e.g. vegetables, fruits, or groats.
5. Juices For Babies
The recommendations regarding giving juices to small children are clear: they should not be given to infants at all, and after the age of a year, the daily amount of juice consumed by the child should be strictly limited.
Juice consumption by infants may result in:
- less appetite and therefore reduced consumption of breast milk or EU organic baby formula (less: protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals such as iron, calcium, and zinc), which in turn causes malnutrition and short stature;
- obesity, related to excess sugar in the diet;
- tooth decay, which is the result of prolonged exposure of teeth to sugars contained in juice;
- flatulence, abdominal pain, or diarrhea in an infant.
Actually, we could go on with this list by including many more products. However, we decided to limit this article to only products with the hidden danger. Of course, you can’t generalize since you can also find baby products with good ingredients that can be safely given to infants. Just check the compositions.
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