When to give meat - 6 months OK?

[jezmond]

Hi, just wondering if I should be introducing a little bit of meat into DD's diet ...

DD is 6 months old and started weaning a few weeks ago. I've read that it is OK to give babies chicken, red meat etc at 6 months but wondered should I wait a few weeks longer to get her fully up and running with the veg & carbohydrates?

meat will be fine now

ds is 5 months and has had chicken and sucked on duck and pheasant already.

physiologically it's one of the first food they should be eating

can you explain that pinktulips, about it being physiologicaly one of the first things they should eat?

is this the iron-from-red-meat theory?

thought that iron stores lasted until at least 6 months

green leafy veg give lots of iron too

as do lots of other foods, though i am not an expert at this!!

i don't know if pink tulips meant from an iron point of view or something else. of course iron can come from other sources but i wondered if there was some other reason or more to it.

i don;t understand the physiological thing either

aren;t we omnivores, not carnivores..or are we carnivores??

sorry, didn't come back on last night. i'm afraid i don't know the full explanation but while i was reading up on BLW i came across that statement (possibly on MN but i can't remember) that back in hunter gatherer times chunks of meat would have been one of the first things baby was introduced to when weaning and they are perfectly physilogically capable of both eating and digesting it.

in my own personal experiance i've found that the only night recently where ds has been settled and content at night, only waking for feeds and settling back as opposed to his usual all night wakfulness were the nights he'd had some chicken to eat for dinner.

i'm not sure whether its got anything to do with the iron content or the protein contained in the meat as i've heard both theories.

sorry, i'm not more imformative, mommy brain combined with 2 babies frazzling my nerves means i don't remember the details of half of what i've read

i read it in somethign gabrielle palmer wrote i think, you know the woman that wrote 'the politics of breastfeeding'? like pinktulips said, it was along the lines of that we should perhaps be giving them meat earlier and ditching starting off with the cereals cos cereals are a crop so be definition came along later than meat. my brain's a bit fuzzy as well but that was the gist. My dd was chewing on chunks of meat at 6months and 2 weeks.

very interesting , thanks PT and Aitch