How to choose foods for your baby / toddler

When our daughter began solids, at about 5 and half months of age, we followed Dr. Joel Fuhrman's advice from his book "Disease-Proof Your Child".  Unfortunately he only has a few (maybe 5) pages on feeding babies and toddlers and most of the book is either making the case for an essentially vegan diet or explaining how to implement one with older children.  At first this was not much of a problem because I continued breastfeeding and the solids were considered to be additional food, not her main diet.  But as she got older, despite the fact that she still breastfeeds, real food began to take primacy in her diet.  So food choices became really important.

If you've read Dr. Fuhrman's other books, such as Eat to Live, he has a measure called nutrient density, which is the amounts of nutrients per calorie.  Foods such as kale, bok choy and spinach top the list of the most nutrient dense foods, since they contain very few calories.  Although these are the top foods for adults that want to slim down or stay healthy, they are not the foods to base a baby's or toddler's diet on.  (Sorry, just ended with a preposition...)  What a little one's diet needs is foods that are super nutritious but also pretty high in calories.  According to the USDA, a toddler between 1-3 needs 1300 (!!!) calories a day.  An adult could survive on that much!!!  In addition, about 50% of their calories still need to come from fat.  And they **need** saturated fats.

If you give your child dairy (milk & cheese), I think it's easier to meet these calorie and fat needs.  I believe there are some really good arguments against consuming dairy, especially at a young age, so we don't use it. So here is a list of foods that I built her diet around until about 18 months of age: Avocados (for us, a simple blend of a mango and an avocado became one of her favorite foods), walnuts (blend a handful with an apple, or an apple and a pear), almonds (use like walnuts), brazil nuts (high in saturated fats), cocoa butter (ordered online at Amazon, added to vegetable blends to increase their fat content).  In addition to these, she ate only fruits and vegetables, and eggs after 15 months.

Most of her foods until 18 months were blended.  On the side I gave her things to chew on, but her meals were blended. Why, you might ask? Because if I cut up an apple, she might eat a few small pieces before she gets bored with the whole undertaking.  And I could't add the nuts to the apple. But if I blended, I could have her eat about two apples and a quarter cup  of walnuts in one sitting.   Same with veggies.  One of my go-to emergency lunches was frozen mixed vegetables.  Guess how much of it you can get into a 1 year old in one sitting? Half the bag! That's about 8 ounces.  So we stuck with blended foods until she made her wishes for "real" foods known. :)   However, even now, I still make her a mango-avocado mix and give it to her as dessert.  Those avocados are magical!

Hello World

I have been writing this blog in my mind for over a year, ever since my daughter started eating solids.  I wish I had indeed written down all the thoughts that went into feeding her, but looking back, I now realize that feeding a 6 to 12 month old was a piece of cake (not literally!), and that the real puzzles of how to provide nutritious food to my toddler really begins at 18 months. Had I read those baby books as religiously as I did during the first year, I might have been better prepared for the sudden lack of enthusiasm for any food I am serving.  Or not, given that I probably would have thought that my kid would be the exception. In any case, I will write down some foods and strategies that worked for us during the easy phase, but will focus on the present times.