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July 22, 2005

Savory Foods First

After weaning dozens of babies, I discovered that they often prefer sweet fruit purees to vegetable purees. This seems especially true for breast-fed babies, because breast milk is naturally sweet. When I was a novice nanny weaning a baby girl for the first time, I offered her mostly fresh fruit purees, as that was what she obviously preferred. I soon realized she wasn’t eating a wide variety of foods and I wished that I had introduced her to foods with a sharper taste first. Since then, all the babies I have weaned have begun their diets with foods like green beans, broccoli, zucchini, turnips, and potatoes. I only add the sweeter vegetables like squash and carrots and then the fruit purees to the diet once the baby has accepted the savory foods and developed a taste for them.

My "savory-foods-first" rule ensures that a baby will like more than sweet foods; she’ll like a variety of foods, and her diet will be well balanced.

- Excerpt from Nanny Wisdom - Chapter Two, Babies - the First Year of Life - Start As you Mean to Go on.

Posted by Hamish Robertson on July 22, 2005. Send to a friend.