Breast is best
Breast milk is the best milk for babies. Breast milk provides the ideal balanced nutrition and protection for your baby. Maternal nutritional requirements increase during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Therefore mothers’ diets should include a wide variety of nutritious food and healthy snacks.
If you are considering bottle feeding, always seek professional advice as once bottle feeding has commenced it can be difficult to revert to breast feeding. Partial bottle feeding may also adversely affect breastfeeding by reducing the supply of breast milk. Always use and prepare infant formula as directed by the manufacturer; unnecessary or improper use of infant formula can be hazardous to the health of your baby.
Before using infant formula, always consider the social and financial implications, such as issues of convenience and cost to the household of using infant formula for at least 12 months. If you are considering using infant formula, it is important to discuss this with a health professional.
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New foods for your baby: 8 months and over
Alongside their breast milk or formula, your baby should be fairly established on solids. It is important that at this stage you offer food before their usual milk feeds. This means that your baby will begin to get more of their nutrition from food than in the earlier stages.
As they grow they’ll be getting a little more adventurous. This will probably slow down as they become a toddler, it’s normal for toddlers around 12-24 months old to be suspicious of any new foods for a while. One theory is that this rejection of new foods at this stage in development is an innate safety mechanism to stop toddlers from eating foods that might be dangerous or poisonous.
In the meantime, you can encourage them to accept new foods by bringing plenty of exciting tastes, textures, colours and shapes to their diets. You might also want to try small snacks like fruit or toast between meals, just be careful not to spoil their appetite.
Hopefully you’ve already introduced more chunky food to your baby’s diet, but if not, definitely start offering more textured food now as if you leave it too late, often babies won’t accept lumpy foods. Also give them finger foods around this stage, and any of yellow-labelled Stage 3 foods from the Heinz baby food range.