Will Offering Fruit Before Vegetables Make Your Baby Crave Sweet Foods?

Katie Ferraro (0s):

So this mom saying, when I put the food out on the baby's plate, he always goes for the fruit first and then he doesn't want to eat anything except the fruit. He starts yelling and crying because he wants more fruit. Now I'm only feeding him fruit. What should I do? Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, Registered Dietitian, college nutrition professor, and mama of seven specializing in baby led weaning. Here on the Baby-Led Weaning Made Easy podcast I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leaving you with the competence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (41s):

Hello, welcome back to another episode of the baby led weaning made easy podcast. I'm your host, Katie Ferraro. I'm a registered dietician and mom of seven specializing in baby led weaning. And we're talking today about fruit. More specifically will offering fruit before vegetables make your baby crave sweet foods. Now, this is a question I get all of the time. We're going to dive deep today to look at whether or not that is true. And I'm also going to provide you with some ideas on how you can safely serve your baby a variety of fruit, but not overdo it. So, as I do with every episode, I want to start you off with a baby led weaning tip of the day: when it comes to fruit, it is okay to skip a meal or a day or even a few days and not serve fruit.

Katie Ferraro (1m 28s):

I call this the fruit vacation and I love fruit as much as the next mom, but too much of a good thing is not a good thing. So we're going to talk about today, how to regulate your baby's fruit intake. So we're not overdoing it because I know you probably know this. The babies can not thrive on fruit alone. Fruit aside I'm going to share with you guys today, why I don't like this trend that you see a lot in baby led weaning of offering your baby a half of a banana with the peel still on the lower quarter. Parents say, oh, it's a handle. It makes it easier for them to hold. I call this the banana lipstick. I have a much easier and safer way to serve your baby banana that avoids keeping the peel on, but can still facilitate self-feeding.

Katie Ferraro (2m 12s):

So I'll get to that today. So let's talk a little bit about fruit. This is certainly not a fruit bashing episode, and I want to lay it out there that there's no hard and fast evidence that says, oh, don't feed your baby fruit because they'll have an affinity for sweet foods. We want to introduce our babies to a wide variety of foods. And you know, in the diet culture for parents, there's often or adults rather there, certain food groups get what we call a health halo, right? One year it'll be fat. Everyone's on a high fat diet. Fat is better than protein or carb. And then the next year it will be protein. Everyone's eating more protein and there's something bad about carbs and fats and so on and so forth.

Katie Ferraro (2m 54s):

But the reality is that all of the food groups are important. They all their own things, right? They might be an opportunity for your baby to try a unique texture like meat. Some foods have more iron like meats and certain plant foods. Whereas fruit as wonderful as it is because it has a good source of water. It has vitamins, particularly vitamin C, which can help your baby absorb iron. It's got fiber. There's no protein in fruit. There's no iron in fruit. So fruit has value, but by itself it is not superior or inferior to the other food groups. So we need to remember that exposure to all food groups in infancy, provide your baby with the familiarity that they'll need not only to get a good variety of the nutrients and have a well balanced diet, but also to continue to like, and accept those foods into toddlerhood.

Katie Ferraro (3m 46s):

We talk a lot about picky eating that some degree of picky eating is inevitable, starting in the second year of life. Guys with older children know that, but this approach where we're trying to offer baby, the widest variety of foods and flavors tastes and textures early and often, we know that that helps raise an independent eater and prevent picky eating. So while your baby might be slightly picky going into that second year of life, having had a greater variety of foods early on in the weaning period, from six to 12 months of life, being exposed to a greater variety, being able to accept a greater variety of foods. If you lose a few of those foods to picky eating in the second year, it's not that big of a deal.

Katie Ferraro (4m 26s):

If you still got 80 or 90 other foods that your baby will eat. So that's why I developed the hundred first foods approach to starting solids with baby led weaning. And in my a hundred first foods approach, there's a category that's called fruits every, the first day of every week, we do five new foods a week. I offer a new fruit Monday's fruit day, but Tuesday's vegetable day Wednesdays, a new starch. Thursday's a new protein. And then Friday I do a new challenge food. So the challenge category has like the big eight allergenic foods and some of the trickier textures and more complex flavors that your baby, maybe doesn't always get the opportunity to try, but certainly can. But I, I have a list of a hundred different foods. Your baby can try.

Katie Ferraro (5m 6s):

And 20 of them are fruits. Parents will say, oh my gosh, I can't believe you're feeding the baby fruit before vegetables. Well, theoretically, yeah, if you only fed your baby fruit, then they wouldn't eat vegetables because they never had the opportunity to be exposed to them. But just so you know, there's nothing wrong with offering your baby fruit. Older babies will say, or parents of older babies will say, but now my baby's only eating fruit. And that's what we're going to strategize about today. How we can help keep that variety going as the baby starts to prefer fruit. So I have a list of a hundred foods. You guys can grab it on my free online workshop, which is called baby led weaning for beginners. How to get your baby to try a hundred foods before turning one, without you having to spoonfeed purees or buy pouches.

Katie Ferraro (5m 49s):

And you can sign up for this week's workshop times. If you go to the show notes for this episode, there's a link there that's BLWpodcast.com/23. This is episode 23 will offering fruit before vegetables make your baby crave sweet foods. The answer is no, but there are some nuances about fruit we need to be aware of. So please keep in mind that a baby may need to see a food 10 to 15 times or more before he or she likes or accepts it. So when it comes to vegetables, sometimes parents will say, oh, I tried beets. Once she turned up her nose at it, let's go back to offering bananas. Cause that's the only food she'll eat. It's kind of like I used to do adult weight management. And when parents would say that all their kids would eat as fast food, like, well, who's driving through the drive-through at the fast food places a year old?

Katie Ferraro (6m 36s):

No, it's the parents. If all we serve is fruit or a fast food, that's all our babies will learn how to eat. So I value fruit very much. However, it's one component of your baby's diet and it's okay. If a meal that you offer does not have fruit. I'm surprised by how many parents, when they hear that pause. Wait, what? It's okay to serve a breakfast without fruit. Heck yeah. We want to have a variety of foods at meals, but every meal doesn't have to feature every food group that I had. I don't like to see parents offering more than three foods to a baby at a mealtime. It's overwhelming. So if let's say you have, the way I like to prepare a meal is let's say you have a Silicon suction mat.

Katie Ferraro (7m 19s):

I use the ezpz mini-map as two, two ounce portions in one, four ounce portion. I'll put the carbohydrate starchy food in the smiley face, the four ounce portion. And the two little pockets of that mat or plate are too is I'll do a small portion of protein and a small portion of fruit or vegetable. I don't do that. Oh, at a meal. I don't do fruit and vegetable, which means that about half of the meals I'm offering just vegetable as well as protein and carb, but I'm not offering fruit. And if you can get into the habit of keeping that rotation, I like to say, it keeps your baby on his or her toes. We don't want to trick your baby, but we also don't want to continually offer the foods that we know our baby likes, because what happens is they become conditioned to expect that food.

Katie Ferraro (8m 3s):

So parents will say I'm trying new foods, but if they don't eat it at the end of the meal, I just finish them off with the pouch because I want to make sure that she's getting enough. Remember we're not so concerned about how much our baby is eating early on, but rather giving the opportunity for our babies to learn how to eat, including all of the food groups, which includes vegetables and sometimes is a meal or a day or even a few days without fruit. And we don't want to go too long without doing fruit, but you get the point. It's okay to not do fruit every meal. So again, there's no evidence to suggest that offering fruit first will cause an affinity for sweet foods. Okay? We do need to offer foods 10 to 15 times before a baby might like or accept it.

Katie Ferraro (8m 44s):

So keep on trying some of those more bitter vegetables that maybe your baby's not having as frequently as they are, are the sweeter fruits. When it comes to fruit, there are a few caveats here. First of all, we offer our babies real intact fruits. We don't want to serve fruit juice. Okay? The American academy of pediatrics says no juice until 12 months of age. That's a nice thing for us to remember. We don't even have to go back and forth about how much fruit juice babies should have. They don't need fruit juice. Babies should eat their fruit, not drink it. There's a couple of reasons why first of all, fruit juice does not have fiber. So one of the benefits of eating fruit is getting fiber, which is an important for your baby's gut health.

Katie Ferraro (9m 27s):

And we don't want to load your baby up on fiber, but a low fiber juice what happens when you extract all of the juice from the fruit, when you're making juice, right? You're essentially leaving the pulp, which is where all the fiber is, out of what the baby's consuming. Not to mention that there's the potential for over-consumption with juice, right? You could easily drink a cup of juice, which might be the equivalent of four oranges. Now you wouldn't sit down and eat four oranges and you probably don't need to, but there's the potential for over consumption and consumption of excess calories, which in turn could lead to unwanted weight gain. So babies do not need juice. Furthermore, babies who walk around with sippy cups, full of juice, or even water down juice, we don't need to do that.

Katie Ferraro (10m 10s):

It contributes to dental caries or cavities. If the baby's always having the sweet juice, bathing their teeth. So babies should drink breast milk or formula. That's it. In the next episode, I'm going to talk a little bit about water and why I don't recommend giving babies water until age one, but just know that formula or breast milk will cut it. As far as your baby's fluid needs go in the first year of life, your baby can eat real fruit, right? If we don't have juice, what should we have? One of the problems with the whole packaged baby food and pouch industry is that if you look at pouches that are marketed as this has kale, or this has quinoa more often than not, it also has applesauce or pear puree or another sweet fruit, which is fine because babies can have soft cooked apples.

Katie Ferraro (10m 58s):

Babies can have soft cooked pears. Babies can have homemade prune puree. Your baby can have real intact versions of these fruits. They don't have to mask the flavor of the vegetable, which is parents will say, oh, my baby's eating kale. No, your baby's eating green colored apple sauce with a smidge of kale in it. And then when they go to try to feed the baby regular kale, oh, they won't eat it well because they're used to having every fruit or vegetable squeeze into their mouth that essentially tastes like apple sauce. So pouches oftentimes include a vegetable, but they're masked in that familiar sweet taste and look at the ingredient list of some of the pouches out there. It's completely unnecessary in order to get your baby to eat kale, to hide it in applesauce force, babies love apple sauce.

Katie Ferraro (11m 45s):

It's sweet, but there's many other safe ways that you can serve your baby greens. That don't require you hiding it in applesauce and squeezing it into your baby's mouth. And as you know, there's no developmental or feeding milestone that says your baby needs to be able to suck sweet purees out of a pouch. We can totally bypass feeding our babies pouches because there are safe ways that babies can eat the intact versions of all of the fruits and vegetables that are oftentimes unnecessarily put into pouches. So fruit is wonderful as it is because it contains vitamin C and it contains a variety of different tastes for your baby. It contains fiber. It contains water. Fruit alone is not a complete diet.

Katie Ferraro (12m 26s):

So you sometimes see these plates high with fruits, for babies. Yes, they're very colorful and they appear to be healthy. But please keep in mind that fruit by itself is insufficient to meet any human beings needs to promote growth and actually can be quite harmful because it doesn't have other important nutrients. So your baby can eat real fruit. But let's talk about the forms that we serve fruit in because sometimes parents will say, well, my baby, I want to serve fruit, but it's very slippery and I don't want to frustrate my baby. So this concept of the banana lipstick comes up again. So I mentioned it at the top of the episode, but have you guys seen this trend in baby led weaning where people will take up a banana and cut it in half with the peel?

Katie Ferraro (13m 9s):

So now you have a half of a banana and they'll take the bottom half and the leave half of the half. So the bottom quarter of the banana to leave the peel on and then take the second quarter, basically remove the peel. So the baby can hold on to the banana handle and they kind of end up just smearing the banana around their face and like, oh, this is an easy way for the baby to eat a banana. I don't like this practice for a number of reasons. First of all, the baby's smearing the peel around their mouth. And they're essentially putting the peel and all of the potential pathogens from the outside of the peel into their mouth. The point of the peel is that it is the protective casing that should be removed in order to expose rather the flesh of the banana, which is what your baby should be eating.

Katie Ferraro (13m 54s):

Like agreed. We don't eat banana peels, right. So why do we give our babies, the banana peel, which I don't know about you, but I do not have time to wash the outside of my bananas, prefer to remove the peel and serve the baby, the banana well parents say, but then how do they pick it up? They need the peel to pick it up. No, they don't. Here's the way that I recommend doing bananas. First of all, be normal. Take the peel off that. What I do is I cut the banana long ways into quarters and they cut it halfway down the middle as well. So you basically can cut your banana into eight Spears. So if you take the bottom half of the banana with no peel, cut that into four long Spears, there'll be each one will be about the size of your pinky finger.

Katie Ferraro (14m 37s):

Obviously depends on how big your banana is. And then I'll serve the baby two or three Spears of the banana out of a silicone suction mat or bowl. So if you're just doing a single food, I like the ezpz tiny bowl. It's a five ounce portion. You don't fill the whole thing up, but you put two or three slices or four, depending on how into fruit your baby is. Or one of them might drop on the floor. One of them might end up in their hair. Part of one might end up in their mouth and remember, early on, your baby is not eating very much. And that is typical. And that is fine. But if you have the silicone suction mat, your baby can, even before they have their pincer grasp, which for most babies doesn't happen until about eight months of age, they can scoop or rake the banana strips, those little Spears up and out of the bowl by themselves.

Katie Ferraro (15m 22s):

If they have that silicone barrier against which they can maneuver the banana, right? So we're promoting and facilitating self-feeding without having to have the baby put the disgusting banana peel in their mouth, okay. Or smear it all over their face, which is not the way that we're trying to encourage them to learn how to eat. So the strips of banana, yes, it might be a little slippery at first and it's okay. If the baby is struggling a little bit, we, we see our baby struggling. We want to jump in and dive in and save them and make things easier for them. But part of learning how to eat also includes learning how to pick up slippery foods. And so for most babies, after a little bit of practice, they will get the hang of even before they have their pencil grasp scooping and raking, and using that Palmer grasp to get the strips of banana up and out and into their mouth.

Katie Ferraro (16m 8s):

For some of the other fruits out there. For example, let's say you do a baked apple slices. One of my favorite ways to serve babies apples is to peel them to quarter it to core. So cut out the middle part and then to cook apple slices, cut it in eight or whatever, eight or six pieces. It depends how big your apple is and cut, cook it in a little bit of water just for a few minutes, till it softens up before it becomes applesauce, you can make your own applesauce if you want to, but we don't start babies hard or raw crunchy pieces of apple or pear, but you can cook them and soften them. But then they're kind of slippery. So you can roll your babies. Slippery, cooked fruit slices in something that will provide it with a little traction.

Katie Ferraro (16m 49s):

So another good example of this is avocado slices. Babies love to eat avocado, but it is pretty hard early on for them to pick up those slippery pieces. So think about the things in your pantry. I often like to roll the slippery fruits in something that provides traction, but extra credit. If you also can provide iron as well, because fruit of course doesn't have iron. And when we're making a baby meal, it's nice to try to include iron. So I roll slippery fruit. In for example, you can do wheat. Germ is one that I have randomly did it the other day. I just found it in my pantry. Good iron source. Oh, brand. If you have that, if you have infant cereal powders, so people say, oh, you don't use rice cereal. I don't serve babies' iron-fortified rice cereal because there's many other foods that they can eat.

Katie Ferraro (17m 34s):

But having rice cereal powder on hand is nice. Sometimes as an ingredient for cooking with certain things or just rolling the baby's apple slices in that you could also do formula powder, although it tends to be more expensive than rice cereal. So if you want to get an opportunity to give a little of iron, think about the things that you could roll the baby's fruit in. You also can just do crushed up iron fortified. Like if I had the bottom of cereal, that my bigger kids are eating, I'll just crush the bottom of the bag. Whatever crumbs are left, we generally only buy iron-fortified cereals with minimal or no added sugar. So you can use those cereal crumbs, just crush them really finds that the baby doesn't choke on it. Okay. So you can roll your fruit in iron containing food powders, crushed up cereals.

Katie Ferraro (18m 19s):

Even I sometimes go to crushed up. If I have leftover panko breadcrumbs. I mean really anything that's kind of a powder. You could make that extra traction for your baby, make it less slippery surface out of a bowl though is helpful for facilitating self-feeding. We don't want to serve the food directly on the highchair tray because in the baby smears at all over the place. And then that gets really frustrating. So yes. Offer your babies fruit. No don't offer your baby's fruit juice. It's okay to go a few days without fruit because babies may need to see those vegetables. You're worried they're not going to eat 10 or 15 times a day, or maybe you do fruit at lunch. And then we have vegetables at dinner, but don't get in the habit of finishing off a meal with a familiar fruit thinking, oh, well, I know the baby will eat it.

Katie Ferraro (19m 4s):

And I want to make sure she gets enough and don't do that with a pouch. Either your baby will become conditioned to expect that. And then they'll continually realize I don't have to eat any of this new stuff. That's out there. She's just going to give me pouch or whatever fruit it is that I love after that. The fact remember that even especially very early on in baby led weaning your baby, doesn't eat much food. And that's okay because the majority of the baby's nutrition is still coming from formula or breast milk. As they're learning how to eat now, your bigger babies. When they get close, you know, 10, 11 months of age, they know how to eat. It's all coming together. They start playing tricks on you dropping food on the floor, refusing certain foods they might've had previously.

Katie Ferraro (19m 46s):

Don't worry. Don't fill them up on milk because we know that hungrier babies will perform and engage better at mealtime you're six or seven months old though, that baby does not know how yet to respond to the feeling of hunger and alleviating it with food because your baby's still learning how to eat your older baby there's evolve. Mom messaged me yesterday. And she said, when I put all the food in my plate, she has an older baby. My baby always goes for the fruit first or the baby's plate. And then he doesn't want to eat anything besides fruit. He starts yelling and crying because he wants more. What can I do for some babies? Especially older babies. They recognize fruit. So I have one of my sons Gussy, the twin, who is the, my sixth child.

Katie Ferraro (20m 27s):

If he sees bananas, even as an older baby, if he saw bananas, he would scream bloody murder and not eat anything. I literally had to remove the bananas from the fruit bowl and the fruit bowl from his line of vision in order to help him concentrate at mealtime. Because the second he saw banana, it was all over. He wasn't going to eat anything else, but out of sight, out of mind, if he only saw the vegetables, the meat, whatever else was on the plate, especially as an older baby and being able to respond to his hunger cues, he's more inclined to eat that. Some days he might eat it some days he might not that's okay. Okay. And as your baby gets older, it seems counterintuitive, but the rate of growth actually slows down. So some parents will be like my baby's almost one and actually started eating less than he did when he was eight or nine months of age.

Katie Ferraro (21m 11s):

That's okay. Our goal here is not to force X or Y amount of food on our babies. Okay. Babies should be allowed to respond to their own internal hunger and fullness cues. It's our job to offer them a variety of foods early and often all the different food groups, but not all at every meal. So it's okay to skip fruit on occasion and offering fruit before vegetables will not make your baby crave sweet foods. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Thanks for listening. Bye now!