Babies Worldwide

For the first year of their life your new babies diet will be almost 100 percent milk. After that they will be slowly weaned on to other forms of food. At this point in babies developement a lot of parents wonder if they should add juice to their babies diet or should they just continue with milk and water.

While researching this article I became aware that some researchers were of the belief that there was a link between the drinking of juice and obesity in young children. It is well established that children in the developed world are now consuming more calories via liquid refreshments: whether it be soads, milk, juice or whatever, the end results been that they add on the extra pounds and as a result become less healthy.

There is no arguement but fruit juice is a valuable source of vital minerals and vitamins. Give the child fruit juice and you will be giving them vitamin C, vitamin B6, folate, iron,potassium and magnesium. Read the label of any pure fruit juice and you’ll find all these essential minerals and vitamins present.

Over the past ten years I’ve become an avid reader of food labels. Walk down the ilse of any supermarket and you can become intimidated with the rows upon rows of premium, own brand and economy labels all of them looking pretty much the same. But lift up a 100 percent pure fruit juice and say the supermakets own brand, turn to the label and you’ll certainly see a difference. Pure fruit juice is as it says on the packet 100 percent pure fruit juice, read the own brand label and you’ll be lucky to get twenty percent fruit juice. That means of course that the remainded has to be made up of something else. What is that something else?

Believe it or not the remainder is made up mainly of sugars, not what you should be giving a growing baby – or taking as an adult for that matter! The advice is buy 100 percent pure fruit juice, take it home and dilute it with equal parts pure water, you will then know exactly what your baby is drinking.

The recomendation is that babies should drink no more than twelve ounces of fruit juice in the day – the younger they are the less juice they should be given. It is really a matter of gently weaning them onto it. Consider also making your own pureed fruits. Here’s one of my favourites:

Banana-apple puree

Ingredients:

* 1 ripe apple
* 1 ripe banana
* 1 cookie for kids (grain cookie)
* Orange juice (optional)

1. Peel the apple. Remove the core and rasp the apple into a bowl.
2. Peel the banana. Cut the banana into small pieces with a knife and puree it with a fork until it smooth.
3. Mix both the apple and the banana until the mixture is smooth.
* You can add some orange juice to it for extra flavour but this isn’t necessary.
* To make the puree thicker you can add a cookie for kids usually a grain cookie.

Have you ever noticed anyone who drinks large amounts of water. Well there is a reason for it. Think of water as an internal cleansing system, just as washing our faces washes off all the dirt and grime gathered there so the same applies with water you consume – it quite simply washes the system out. Now we all know that babies urinate on a regular (very regular) basis when there is sufficent water in their bodies so use this as a guide to giving baby some extra fluid, water, if it is not urinating on a pretty regular basis it may be it is not receiving enought water. As always if you have worries consult your medical advisor.

We all know how important water is for the body. Babies get a large amount of the water that they need from breast milk and formula but if you have taken the baby out for a walk and it is hot give baby a bottle of water to help cool it down. When you introduce solid foods into babies diet then try and give baby a four ounce bottle of water twice a day. Remember also that your baby has been used to drinking breast milk or formula up to this point and if you take a look at either you’ll quickly see that they are thicker than water. One of the reasons babies gulp their food is that they haven’t noticed this and they think that they should be drinking at the same pace. A way to avoid this is to encourage baby to take some water after feeding that way they would be hungry and will take more time over their drink.

Fruit juices in moderation will do baby no harm. As mentioned above a good idea is to use pure fruit juice and dilute it with equal parts water. Don’t over do feeding. As long as an excess of juice is not drank, baby gets the nutrients without the extra sugar or weight gain and will benefit from both its intake of juice and pure water.

Tags: fruit juice

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Baby Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.