A solid approach to infant nutrition

When it’s time to add solid food to a baby’s diet, is it best to spoon-feed purees—the conventional approach—or to allow the baby to feed herself soft finger foods? The second path, called baby-led weaning, has exploded in popularity in the past decade, yet many parents and caregivers worry about whether it results in healthy growth or could have negative effects.

Colorado State University nutritionists are solving the question, with implications for an untold number of babies. The researchers assessed 150 infants from age 6 months to 1 year to compare baby-led weaning and a typical pureed weaning diet and found that babies in the two groups acquired similar calories and nutrition and grew at the same pace.

The study is the first to correlate dietary and growth data and to scientifically compare growth outcomes from the two weaning approaches. It did not assess specific health indicators, but findings suggest healthy growth and development are attainable if baby-led weaning relies on a variety of healthy foods.

“These findings reassure parents and caregivers that babies following baby-led weaning grow at the same rate as babies following conventional weaning,” said Minghua Tang, a professor and the Lillian Fountain Smith Endowed Chair in Nutrition in CSU’s Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition.

Tang and her doctoral student, Kinzie Matzeller, conducted the research with colleagues at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and published their findings in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

“Baby-led weaning is so popular, but we didn’t have that much research-based evidence about whether it was superior to conventional weaning or whether it might do harm,” Tang said. “These findings are helping fill a gap by showing that babies following baby-led weaning grow at the same trajectory as those weaned with spoon-feeding.”

It’s rewarding to provide parents and caregivers with evidence-based information rather than anecdotes, Matzeller said.

“I feel a relief to be able to rely on research and optimistic that parents might not have to worry about healthy growth if they opt for baby-led weaning,” she said.

Proponents of baby-led weaning, including social media influencers, note that the approach encourages babies to eat the same foods their families eat; to regulate their intake based on hunger cues, which can lead to healthy, long-term eating habits; and to improve fine motor skills, which boost neurological development.

There are important caveats that make baby-led weaning successful, Tang said. Among them: Babies must be developmentally ready to feed themselves, must eat sufficiently soft foods cut into small pieces to avoid choking, and must be offered a healthy diet.

Solid food is typically introduced when a baby is about 6 months old, when the infant is still ingesting breast milk or formula to meet most of her nutritional needs. By age 10 months to 1 year, most babies get about half their nutrition from solid foods, Tang said.

The new study has several distinctive aspects:

• It specifically defined baby-led weaning as relying on less than 10% pureed foods, rather than depending on general descriptions from parents and caregivers.
• It analyzed dietary records to pinpoint calories and nutrition consumed per day.
• It linked dietary intake with growth data each month of the study to understand and compare the effects of baby-led weaning and conventional weaning.

This quantitative, or data-based, dietary assessment yielded objective findings that parents and caregivers may rely on when making weaning decisions.

Although baby-led weaning has surged in popularity in recent years, it reflects the way most families fed babies before processed food became the norm, Matzeller noted. Now, blended baby food is commonly available in jars and pouches.

The baby-led weaning study is an outgrowth of a larger research project Tang leads called the Maternal and Infant Nutrition Trial, an 18-month investigation into how different protein-rich foods affect growth and gut health in babies.

Who’s behind this story?

Sadie Harley

BSc Life Sciences & Ecology. Microbiology lab background with pharmaceutical news experience in oil, gas, and renewable industries.

Full profile →

Advertisements

Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

Full profile →