Starting Solids

The most frequent question we get asked about starting solids is “when do I start solids”? Our recommendation is 6 months. Before that time, your baby may not have a digestive system that is mature enough to handle solid food. Some pediatricians do recommend starting at 4 months, but most recommend waiting 6 months. This is because a baby’s digestive system and digestive lining mature sometime between 4-6 months. Waiting the full 6 months ensures your baby’s digestive system has the time it needs to mature before solids are introduced.

How to Introduce Solids

When you begin solids, introduce one single-ingredient food at a time until your baby has had exposure to a long and varied list of single-ingredient foods, including common culprits of allergic reactions. Doing this exercise helps you quickly identify the cause of any negative reactions like allergy, rash, reflux, or eczema. The CDC recommends waiting 3-5 days between the introduction of each new single-ingredient food.  

First Foods

When it comes to choosing a “first food” to start with, we recommend starting with 2-3 vegetable varieties before fruit. This exposes your baby’s palate to savory flavors before sweets and can help create a lifelong taste for healthy vegetables. 

Kitchen Essentials

If you are making homemade baby food puree, our favorite baby food maker for Stage 1 and Stage 2 is an immersion blender. It purees right in the pot and won’t become obsolete after 3 months. Instead, you can continue using it in your kitchen for all sorts of soups, sauces, and purees for years to come (you may even already have one!)

And a tool we love for lightening fast chopping is a microplane or fine grater. You can grate up a piece of steak, a hard boiled egg, a cucumber, or a slice of cantaloupe in record time, without any expensive machinery.

Bottom line: early food with your baby should be exciting, simple, safe, and fun. Enjoy!