How old was your baby when you started giving him cereal??

Question

How old was your baby when you started giving him cereal??

Answer 1

Rice cereal? My son was 6 weeks when we started putting some in his bottle (dr recommendation) and we started feeding it to him on a spoon about 4 months

Answer 2

I have 5 month old twins and we won't be feeding them cereal at all.  We're going right to foods at 6 months.  Like PPs said, there really is no nutritional need to start with cereal.

Answer 3

4 months.

Answer 4

My baby is 3 months now but once she turns 4 months, I will starting her cereal.  

Answer 5

never, cereal is just junk carbs, it has no nutritional value in it. Its bad for a babies GI tract and can cause so many problems if introduced early. So I decided just to feed my son bananas and avocados at around 7 months of age.

Answer 6

She was close to 4 months, I tried rice, but she didn't like it, so I went to oats and she liked that alot better , and it doesn't constipate them.

Soon after I started her on purees, veggies and then fruits. Now I make all my own foods for her.

here is a link with great info on baby's 1st foods, how to make them, what to avoid, when to start. Good Luck!1

Answer 7

6 months but my son didn't really like it he only ate it for a week before he started spitting it out. some people say its a waste because it is junk carbs but the point of it is to get your baby used to swallowing things that are not liquid so it can be helpful if your baby likes it

Answer 8

6 months, but it was kinda gross.  She liked bits of real food better!  Next baby, I'll skip the rice cereal completely.  It's a crappy starch babies don't need.  :)

Answer 9

my boys were 2 months old and my oldest was 6 months old.  my boys were big eaters though.  they were drinking 8 oz every 1 1/2 to 2 hrs.  it was dr recommened for my kids though.

Answer 10

I have a 28 month old and an 8 month old and neither has, nor ever will, eat that c**p they market as "baby cereal".

Have you read what's in it?

Also I never spoon feed anything, there are many, many reasons not to spoon-feed pureed food to a baby and NO good reason to.  The baby food industry wants to make money, not benefit babies.

Why not cereal?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9646449/page...

Take rice cereal, for example. Under conventional American wisdom, it's the best first food. But Butte says iron-rich meat — often one of the last foods American parents introduce — would be a better choice.

Dr. David Ludwig of Children's Hospital Boston, a specialist in pediatric nutrition, says some studies suggest rice and other highly processed grain cereals actually could be among the worst foods for infants.

"These foods are in a certain sense no different from adding sugar to formula. They digest very rapidly in the body into sugar, raising blood sugar and insulin levels" and could contribute to later health problems, including obesity, he says.

The lack of variety in the American approach also could be a problem. Exposing infants to more foods may help them adapt to different foods later, which Ludwig says may be key to getting older children to eat healthier.

http://www.kellymom.com/nutrition/solids...

Cereal is not at all necessary, particularly the baby cereals. Regular (whole grain) oatmeal is more nutritious for your baby.

http://www.askdrsears.com/faq/ci2.asp

The truth is, there is nothing special about these foods that makes them better to start out with. Babies don't actually even need rice cereal

http://www.llli.org/llleaderweb/LV/LVDec...

Meat provides additional protein, zinc, B-vitamins, and other nutrients which may be in short supply when the decrease in breast milk occurs. A recent study from Sweden suggests that when infants are given substantial amounts of cereal, it may lead to low concentrations of zinc and reduced calcium absorption (Persson 1998). Dr. Nancy Krebs has shared preliminary results from a large infant growth study suggesting that breastfed infants who received pureed or strained meat as a primary weaning food beginning at four to five months, grow at a slightly faster rate. Dr. Krebs' premise is that inadequate protein or zinc from complementary foods may limit the growth of some breastfed infants during the weaning period. Both protein and zinc levels were consistently higher in the diets of the infants who received meat (Krebs 1998). Thus the custom of providing large amounts of cereal products and excluding meat products before seven months of age may not meet the nutritional needs of all breastfed infants.

Meat has also been recommended as an excellent source of iron in infancy. Heme iron (the form of iron found in meat) is better absorbed than iron from plant sources. In addition, the protein in meat helps the baby more easily absorb the iron from other foods. Two recent studies (Makrides 1998; Engelmann 1998) have examined iron status in breastfed infants who received meat earlier in the weaning period. These studies indicate that while there is not a measurable change in breastfed babies' iron stores when they receive an increased amount of meat (or iron), the levels of hemoglobin circulating in the blood stream do increase when babies receive meat as one of their first foods.

http://www.westonaprice.org/children/nou...

Finally, respect the tiny, still-developing digestive system of your infant. Babies have limited enzyme production, which is necessary for the digestion of foods. In fact, it takes up to 28 months, just around the time when molar teeth are fully developed, for the big-gun carbohydrate enzymes (namely amylase) to fully kick into gear. Foods like cereals, grains and breads are very challenging for little ones to digest. Thus, these foods should be some of the last to be introduced. (One carbohydrate enzyme a baby's small intestine does produce is lactase, for the digestion of lactose in milk.1)

[...]

Babies do produce functional enzymes (pepsin and proteolytic enzymes) and digestive juices (hydrochloric acid in the stomach) that work on proteins and fats.12 This makes perfect sense since the milk from a healthy mother has 50-60 percent of its energy as fat, which is critical for growth, energy and development.13 In addition, the cholesterol in human milk supplies an infant with close to six times the amount most adults consume from food.13 In some cultures, a new mother is encouraged to eat six to ten eggs a day and almost ten ounces of chicken and pork for at least a month after birth. This fat-rich diet ensures her breast milk will contain adequate healthy fats.14

Thus, a baby's earliest solid foods should be mostly animal foods since his digestive system, although immature, is better equipped to supply enzymes for digestion of fats and proteins rather than carbohydrates.1 This explains why current research is pointing to meat (including nutrient-dense organ meat) as being a nourishing early weaning food.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content...

The results indicate that in a group of healthy, well growing 12-month-old Swedish infants one-quarter is iron-depleted, although iron deficiency anaemia is rare, and one-third may be zinc-depleted. The high cereal intake of Swedish infants from 6 months of age may have limited the bioavailability of both iron and zinc from the diet.

http://www.jpgn.org/pt/re/jpgn/abstract....

Conclusions: These results confirm that meat as a complementary food for breast-fed infants can provide a rich source of dietary zinc that is well absorbed. The significant positive correlation between zinc intake and exchangeable zinc pool size suggests that increasing zinc intake positively affects metabolically available zinc.

Answer 11

My boy was 7 weeks when his doctor recommended putting a small amount in his bottle to help with spitting up.  

Answer 12

4 months.  My doc said it was ok and he was a big healthy boy.

Answer 13

My Dr told me that when my son stopped sleeping through the night to give him a tablespoon of rice cereal before bed.  That happened at 4 months...dd what the Dr said, and it worked like a charm.