Baby eating shop bought baby food.

[jodiekidd]

My baby is 9 months old.

He loves shop bought baby food which I've been mainly feeding him on since we started weaning.

He's putting on weight well and is 50th percentile.

He does eat other little bits but it's mainly jars and pouches.

I'm feeling quite shameful and embarrassed that he's eating this but he likes it and it makes my life easy.

Will this effect his eating habits going forward. Has anyone else fed their babies solely shop bought food?

We did the opposite 😂With DC1, I was really cautious and wanted to be perfect. So I actually cooked separately for him and pureed every meal including his lunch at the childminder's before he turned 1 (The childminder provided food from 1 year onwards).

But it was so exhausting ( I was working full time back then). So when the DC2 arrived, I loathed cooking from scratch. Fed him lots of shop bought baby food (but never the fruits pouches, as they are really excessively sweet) but also mixed with some meals from homemade puree (family meals that I found suitable for him). He quit shop bought food around 3 when he could more or less easy with the rest of us. He's a very adventurous eater though. So he nearly eats everything.

Ella’s kitchen is shop bought. Shop bought is good - easy way of feeding. No time to make your own when you’re working full time!

They're fine OP. I used them sometimes, depending on what I was doing - if busy or out of the house an Ella's pouch was great and he loved them. There are a few other 'naice' brands too (I remember Babese was all very quinoa and kale type mixes) so gives a variety of tastes. At around 8-10 months I probably used a pouch most days for either lunch or dinner plus some easy finger foods, because it was quicker and easier. As he got older and better at eating he went off the pouches and preferred real food - beans on toast was a favourite!

There are loads of recipes online for making lumpy purees - I remember making a really lovely dahl and a lentil-based bolognaise sauce type thing that were both really tasty and froze well. I had the What Mama Makes book which was very helpful, and Annabel Karmel has some good ones too.

This is a really small issue, don't worry about it!

If you want to transition I would recommend the Hipp meals in the triangular packaging, because they are much more textured than jars and more like "real food" but still familiar/processed enough that they are like the jar type meals. At 9 months I would give half of one and save the other half in the fridge. TBH even my 4yo likes these - I wouldn't buy them for him at 4, but his little brother eats them and he wants one sometimes too. Why not? DH tends to serve them with cut up veg on the side.

I wouldn't worry about jars at nine months. We fed our son jars from when he first started weaning and went through the various age brackets in them up to ten months alongside small bits of finger food. When he was ten months we were on full time finger food and from one year old we started cooking him the baby meals from the NHS website (mac and cheese, curries, fish pasta etc) and freezing those in batches. From two years old he has been served whatever we eat and gets on pretty well with it. Some meals he'll eat everything (he loves curries and pasta meals but doesn't get on so well with stews or potato based things) and others he won't but that's toddlers 😅

It is far less frustrating to see Heinz carrot puree flicked on the wall behind him, down the sides of the highchair and being dribbled down the bib than it is carrot puree, lovingly simmered, mashed and frozen in ice cube trays.

Do what works op. Mine had shop bought baby food and grew up to have a wide and varied diet.

My son has cmpa and soya allergy. He's currently only 3 months and we know he has these allergies through BF. His consultant was very very clear that we were to introduce other potential allergies when weaning slowly, and definitely no-on skin but orally. The advice about rubbing it onto skin is now not best practice as its been shown to actually trigger an allergy response when next given orally.
We potentially have to go into hospital to have them introduce certain foods to make sure he's okay as he reacts so badly through breast milk which ofcourse breaks down proteins anyway.
What I'm trying to say in a roundabout way is please do your own research about allergies. Allergy.co.uk is fab etc. Health visitors are great but they don't always have the most recent advice. Also gathering of information is beneficial anyway, don't take one person's word as gospel.

Also in regards to homemade v shop brought. Honestly they all end up eating things of the floor eventually. eyes 7 year old who was fed all homemade food and now visibly shakes with excitement over a mcdonalds.

At 9 months he can eat mostly what you are eating, just chop, mash or shred meat. Mine weren't eating baby food by 9 months

@Emmamoo89

Interesting. I was told no nuts before 3 years old when I had mine. No dairy before a year. Neither have any allergies. Advice certainly changes

Everyone is different with their preferences and parenting choices. It's not going to hurt him and you are not a 'bad parent' for doing this.

However....

I'm a 90's kid and was brought up on shop bought baby jars and a lot of processed frozen/ tinned food (think potato smileys, canned meatballs/ soup, white bread, chicken nuggets, findus crispy pancakes, corned beef etc.)

As an adult I'm obviously still alive and pretty healthy as far as I know.

But I have also been a bit overweight for most of my life, and I do get annoying cravings for processed junk. Despite now knowing what a healthy diet should look like, and my efforts to improve my diet in adulthood, I still get cravings for stuff I was fed as a kid. I eat healthily now, but I am often battling cravings which I think are the result of my childhood diet.

Another issue I had is that it took me a long time to expand my diet and try new foods, because I just wasn't exposed to them. Until my late teens really I was quite reluctant to eat things that were not 1) beige or 2) processed.

Whilst it's not going to hurt your child in any immediate way, I would highly recommend you mix it up with some fresh food as well and encourage trying new things. Yes it's an effort, but I believe the food we have in childhood really does impact our tastes for the rest of our lives.

It's not just about getting through the day and what's easy - you are setting a little person up for the rest of their adult life. Looking back I do wish that my parents had not fed me so much junk, although at the time they didn't know any better.

Why are you being so rude? And why are you massively derailing the thread by spouting nonsense without providing any source to back it up? Rather than following actual NHS advice?

Im sure this mess of a thread has left OP feeling even more confused considering she wasn’t even asking for allergen advice!!!!

Not being rude at all. Just stating what my health visitor told me. And I think I'm going to trust her over strangers on the Internet 🙄

Just giving advice to help out. Just giving them it orally can be dangerous and not worth the risk. As a couple on here have proved otherwise.

It’s recommended to have swapped to solid food by 9 months. No need for anything fancy from weaning books, just whatever you are eating served in a safe way.

Evidence shows that you are more likely to have a fussy eater if you extend purées past 9 months.

This summarises different ways to wean and explains (with links to peer reviewed research) why. Their app is also great for showing how to safely serve food, whether that’s allergies or safely cutting!

This gives you some ways to help - solidstarts.com/therapy-throwdown-challenges-from-spoons-to-fingers/

It didn’t link properly! solidstarts.com/methods/

It's not bad, but might be even better to give more homemade stuff for range of nutrients, flavours, textures.

I found there was quite a small window to give them a range of foods before they got toddler-fussy.

This is poor advice. This isn’t recommended. I have a child with allergies and they don’t recommend you do this.

You can actually make your child allergic to the food you are smearing in their face.

It is recommend to introduce allergens from 6 months in food.

Hi again. I understand this is a well intentioned post and you are only following the advice of the HV, but I promise you this is not the way to do it. As a mother of a child with a large number of allergies, and the daughter of a man that died from allergies aged 36, this has really upset me because I can see people are reading your post and believing it. Some of them will follow your advice and could give their child a lifelong allergy as a result.

If you can, please take some time to consider that the advice is incorrect and contact your health visitor to let her know that she needs to stop telling new mums this.

You are lucky that your children aren't affected but allergies are no joke and your HV could inadvertently change the course of someone's life.

I think you need to do a mix of both. Pouches are ok if you're out or in a hurry

Its £££ to buy pouches and all that plastic you're using

At nine months baby can have more solids anyway. Shouldnt he/she be getting more finger food than mush on a spoon?

Who has time for homemade stuff when you’re working full time and you need something available to give them as soon as you walk in the door at the end of a workday? Pouches and jars are great - easy to feed them and more importantly no mess.
No difficulty in transitioning to regular food when we’d worked out way through the pouches and jars. Neither were fussy eaters so it obviously worked for us

Shop bought purées can be very high in sugar and even salt. They generally have fruit added to make them sweet - that’s why babies like them. They are marketed as being savoury but they really aren’t. I would avoid except in circumstances where you have no other choice (for example, if you’re travelling).

The easiest and healthiest way to wean a baby is just to give them whatever you are eating (assuming you don’t have a dreadful diet) and don’t cook with salt. There really is no need for specially prepared “baby food”.

Ella’s Kitchen - chicken casserole with apricots.

No way was I going to have the time to make this so perfect for DT’s.

Organic vegetable stock 33% (water and organic vegetables: carrots, parsnips, leeks, onions and swedes) Organic carrots 23% Organic chicken 11% Organic broccoli 11% Organic onions 11% Organic fruit 5% (apricots and raisins) Organic rice 5% Organic mixed herbs <1% (mint, marjoram, parsley, thyme) Organic peppercorns <1% Other stuff 0%

.........and it makes my life easy.

And that's the problem.