Tips To Optimize Infant Victuals

Whether one is making the infant’s foods at home or preferring to buy ready made foods is basically a matter of personal choice. Bought foods are surely convenient if one is traveling in a jiffy, but the drawback is that they are more expensive and are not always nutritionally sound. If the use of bought foods is going to be on a regular basis, one needs to adhere to key guidelines.

Always checking the list of ingredients on the jar or tin is quite essential. The listing is always mentioned in the order of concentration. One should steer clear of those food items in which water is listed first. If buying canned items, watching out for dents, leakage or seal on jars are unbroken is important. One must keep a watch for sell-by dates and avoid cut price items that are close to their expiry date.

It is better to stay away from buying anything that states ‘mixed dinners’ as they mostly contain loads of thickener. If home made preparations need to be thickened, one can use ground, wholegrain cereals like wheat germ, cottage cheese, yoghurt or mashed potato. The water leftover from steaming fruits and vegetables is ideal, but one can also add expressed milk, cow’s milk, soup, orange or apple juice, tomato for thinning down a food preparation. Handle fruits and vegetables gently, cutting them only when you have to immediately use them. Avoid crushing or bruising them as the vitamin C content gets destroyed.

Any food with added sugar, salt, modified starch or monosodium glutamate (MSG) must not be bought. Also, avoiding cordials and cola drinks, or anything with brown or white sugar or saccharin added to them. Natural, unsweetened fruit juice is the best, but if the need to sweeten foods arises dextrose is a better bet. Although, traditionally blackcurrant or rosehip based syrup drinks are given to babies, but they are simply calorie dense and bad for the teeth.

Overcooking tinned foods for too long destroys the vitamins in it. Also heating the food up in the jar may crack it. Copper pans must be avoided when cooking green leafy vegetables as cooper breaks down the vitamin C. Using cast iron pots is a good option as a little iron is absorbed into the food, thus helping in keeping the child’s iron supplies topped up. Too much of saturated fats in not advisable, using safflower or corn oil instead is ideal.

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