Feeding baby family food - salty ingredients?

[trrk]

I’m trying to move more towards feeding my 7.5 month old family food which has worked well for fairly simple meals (eg salmon, potatoes and veg) but a lot of the things we eat seem unsuitable or hard to adapt.

I’ve read you can feed babies anything except honey and choking hazards but what about recipes with high salt ingredients? It’s easy to leave salt out and I even found salt free stock but I cook a lot of Asian inspired food with soy sauce, fish sauce etc which I believe are high in salt. Are they OK in small amounts? I also do a lot of curries (both Thai and South Asian style) and not sure if these are too hot for a baby even if they are probably a lot milder than the authentic version.

The heat of curries is fine. Salt is not. You can get reduced salt soy sauce but I’ve no idea if it’s low enough, you’d have to check the label.
babies have died by eating the same high salt meals as their parents, it would be better to cook theirs separately and then add in your salty sauces for your portions.

Babies should not eat much salt, because their kidneys are not fully developed to process it. Babies under 1 year old should have less than 1g of salt a day.
www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-nutrition/

You can get low salt versions, but yea, some foods even then just aren't suitable for babies

Salt should be avoided but in small amounts it is inevitable when you switch to family meals. For things like stir fries I would pull their portion out before I added the soy sauce for instance but often they just ate exactly what we ate. They have eaten curries (I make my own paste and watch the salt) from around 8 months, both loved spicy food

The type of food you plan on cooking is a little challenging for a 7.5 month old, so if you are facing spicy / salty stir fries etc, I'd cook separate meals.

Easier meals are salmon plus green veg & potatoes. All can be made a bit more adult with additional seasoning but make for a perfect baby meal too - small piece of fish, mashed up potato & couple green veg.

Following with interest as I'd like to start givi g my seven month old what we eat, but I'm not terribly confident. So shameful leap into your thread

They can eat spicy foods. What do you think babies in those countries eat?

Salt shouldn't be added to food but it's ok for them to have food containing salt. Ham, cheese, marmite are all quite salty but fine for babies in small quantities (which is what they have anyway)

My two were big marmite fans right from the off.

I'd just take a portion out for baby like others have mentioned. 7.5 months is still too little for too much salt. I drop or two of soy would be fine though! I'm sure baby will love that, my children certainly did

I bought a blw cook book that had how to make various sauces and dishes for the family from scratch to minimise the salt content. I look at it over a day and prefer to give cheese (some salt) so limit other foods. I haven't given my 18m old soy sauce from a shop for instance.

Thanks all for the advice! Will definitely minimise salt and try to come up with some meals that will be suitable for all of us as I hate cooking twice. We do a simple fish/potatoes/veg type meal once a week but a variety of stuff the rest of the time.

What would you do in a restaurant situation when on holiday where food probably has sone added salt? We have several trips coming up over the next bit including one where we will be mostly eating out (staying in hotel). We can do breakfast easily enough but concerned about how we will manage lunch/dinner. If there is suitable restaurant food to try I’d prefer that over just relying on pouches or jars of baby food but is it too risky for salt?

Tbh don't overthink it.

Children's meals don't tend to have much salt in them anyway. Plus a few days isn't going to do them any harm.

We're just back from a week's AI. My kids ate chips twice a day every day. It's one week out of 52. It's not the end of the world.

With mine we'd either take sandwiches out with us or a pouch. But then if we didn't have either they'd have a bit of ours or something from the kids menu.

I think it will be fine. You can ask the restaurant to reduce the salt. If you're going abroad then good hotels will make food for the little one too or adjust it