How to have a healthy baby

Most of the baby's diet will consist of milk for weeks yet. When he does begin to reduce his milk intake because he positively wants more, starting a baby on solids might not be such a good idea even if making your own baby food as he will still drink enough milk to provide almost all the protein, minerals and vitamins he needs.

When making your own baby food for the first time thinking that starting a baby on solids might not be such a bad idea to begin with, you should know that they are needed only for their calories at such a young age - their fuel - and there are calories in every kind of food. Your baby will get no more benefit from an expensive "high-protein" cereal than from an ordinary one. He does not need the extra protein in the expensive product, only the calories, which are in both.

Starting a baby on solids and making your own baby food is a very serious matter, so choosing first foods is more a matter of avoiding the few types that are particularly likely to cause allergic reactions than selecting those that will be particularly good for him. He can have almost any food that you ordinarily serve provided it has a taste he likes, a semi-liquid texture he can easily take, and no ill-effects on his digestion. Once he has got the idea of taking food without sucking, try to offer a wide variety of flavours so that you find out, by experiment, what your baby likes and what he docs not. Even at this early stage, when taste acuity is still developing, |g have definite preferences which you should respect.

When making your own baby food and starting a baby on solids should make you realize that some foods are especially liable to provoke allergic reactions in young babies and should therefore be avoided altogether until at least six months and then introduced in tiny quantities and one at the time: wheat cereals and wheat flour (including bread); eggs (yolk as well as white); citrus fruits (including orange juice marketed for babies); nuts and peanut butter (even the smooth kind).

Rice or cornmeal cereals are the traditional first choices when making your own baby food. But they are also marketed specially prepared for babies and they only need mixing with formula, breast milk or boiled cow's milk, so starting a baby on solids might not be such a difficult thing to do as it might first appeared.

Cereals have a lot going for them, especially the advantage of being rich in, or enriched with, iron - the one nutrient which exclusively breast-fed babies might be beginning to need. But although their bland milky taste is sufficiently like babies' accustomed food that they are seldom rejected outright, many babies prefer strained fruits or vegetables. The tastes are more surprising than the taste of unsweetened cereal, but they are also more interesting.

You could try sieved ripe banana or avocado, stewed apple, boiled and strained potato, yam, plantain, spinach and carrot.