Starting solids

[Ohboy2018]

My son is 6 months old and I want to start him on solids. I want to start with rice cereal but I’m so confused on how to go about doing it and can’t get a straight answer from his doctor or online. Can someone please tell me how many times a day I should give him the rice cereal and how long he should be on it before I can give him something else? Also, do I have to wait a week between oatmeal, barley, and brown rice? Are those considered different? Oh and what’s this stuff I hear about arsenic in the rice cereal and not to give too much. How can I not give too much if I have to give it everyday for an X amount of time.

Don’t offer rice cereal. It’s processed junk and there are concerns about high arsenic levels. If you don’t want to just offer regular foods (finger foods), then offer vegetable purée or normal oat porridge. You don’t need to stagger what you can offer. They can eat any of it right away unless due to allergies in your family your GP has advised otherwise.

Just start with one to two teaspoons before a milk feed at lunchtime. Usually, mums only give pure baby rice for the first two or three days of weaning, while their babies get used to taking food from a spoon. Once your LO is getting the hang of it, you’ll want to move on swiftly to purées for several reasons.
Firstly, it’s a high carbohydrate, highly processed product. Most brands are made from white rice, which quickly metabolizes into sugar. We know that we need to avoid foods that give us sugar spikes, and the same goes for babies.
Secondly, as you know, a recent study found that a number of brands of baby rice, and some baby cereals made with baby rice, contained potentially harmful toxins such as arsenic, linked with cancer, and cadmium, a metal that can cause kidney damage. These toxins enter the product through contaminated water used to irrigate rice crops in certain countries.
The small amounts of baby rice that you give when you’re first weaning are unlikely to cause long-term health problems, but it’s best to avoid giving it more than once a day, and to move on to other foods early in the weaning process.

The NHS weaning advice page is good: www.nhs.uk/start4life/weaning/what-to-feed-your-baby/around-6-months/

There's nothing wrong with baby rice - you'll see they suggest it as one possible first food - but there are loads of other things you can try as well, and there's no need to stick with one food for ages (you only have to introduce one food at a time if your baby either has a known allergy or a very high risk family history, and in that case the GP should refer you to a dietician so they can advise you).

I think you're maybe getting a bit confused by how people wean when they do it much earlier - how family members might have done it with a baby of four months, or even younger. If you've waited until six months you can skip lots of that stuff and don't have to go as slowly. Also, just to prepare you - again unlike younger babies, who don't have the coordination to feed themselves - a lot of the six month olds I knew, including DS, didn't want to be spoonfed and insisted on feeding themselves.

Wow that link is veryyy helpful! Thank you so much.

I like that. I think I’ll do that. Thank you for explaining it in detail for me.