At what point does nutritional balance become important?

[trrk]

At what point do you swap from just trying different foods to trying to make baby’s diet nutritionally balanced? Our baby is 7 months now and we have mostly just been trying different things so far (purée and finger food) with quite a lot of veges but not much meat or fish yet. At what point does it become more important to make sure her diet is balanced wrt carbs/protein/fat/vitamins? We are travelling for most of the 7-8 month period, staying with various family but not doing the meal planning or cooking. Is it OK to keep up the current approach, maybe giving breakfast and then anything appropriate from our meals at other times of the day and the odd pouch or jar of baby food?

"Food is for fun until you are one"

This isn't necessarily 100% accurate but a good rule of thumb - until baby is having more food than milk you can pretty much rely on the milk (formula or breast) to do the balancing for you. Certainly not something to worry about at 7/8 months.

What @ABingStory said, really. I started thinking about it properly at about 10 1/2 months as dd (who was combi fed from birth) suddenly started refusing formula, so although she still had my breastmilk I wasn't sure how much she was actually getting. Definitely don't worry about 7/8 months.

It's a sliding scale till about age one but basically when they are having more food than milk is when it's important.

I agree, when they slide into having more food than milk.

You could always give them vitamins each day whilst you are travelling if you are worried about them missing out

Ba ha ha wait til you have a toddler that only eats yoghurts, raisins and toast.

Kids are a PITA to feed, throw vegetables into them when you can and don't worry about it, we are survived being raised on findus crispy pancakes in the 89s

"Food is for fun until you are one" is something you will only ever read on MN!
It couldn't be further from the truth. All the science states the opposite.