A History of the 100 First Foods Approach to Baby-Led Weaning

Katie Ferraro (1s):

So with the 100 First Foods approach, you're introducing five new foods per week. Four low-risk foods, Monday to Thursday. And then Friday you do one of the challenge fruits starting in the first week of baby-led weaning. That includes the allergenic foods. It's 20 foods a week. It's 100 Foods before your baby's one. Hey, there I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietitian, college nutrition professor and mom 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 (42s):

Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Baby-Led Weaning Made Easy Podcast. Today's episode is a little bit different than what you're used to. I'm going to walk you through a history, a brief history of the 100 First Foods approach to starting solids with baby-led weaning. So maybe some of you are doing my 100 First Foods challenge, or you've heard about offering your baby 100 different foods before they turn one. And I get questions from parents all the time. Like what's the significance of 100 Foods or why 100, or how did you pick the 100 Foods that are on your 100 First Foods list and in your program. So I want to give you the nitty gritty behind the 100 First Foods approach in today's episode.

Katie Ferraro (1m 24s):

Now, if you're interested in this approach, my 100 First Foods program that I co-teach with my colleague, Ms. Don SLP is open just a few times each year for a limited period for enrollment and it's open right now. So if you want to check out the program, go to 100firstfoods.com and find everything you need. Again, this is something we teach just a few times each year, but because we're in 100 First Foods mode at the time of this recording, I want to talk a little bit about how the program came to be. So back in 2016, I created the 100 First Foods approach to starting solids with baby-led weaning. And if we look at the research, we know that babies who are exposed to a greater variety of foods and flavors and tastes and textures early and often, those are the babies who are more likely to be independent eaters and less likely to be picky eaters.

Katie Ferraro (2m 15s):

The key there is the word variety. Variety can mean a lot of different things, right? If you have two foods that you eat, then having three food might be considered variety to you. But when we look at the research, we see that most babies have somewhere between 10 and 20 foods that they've tried by the time they turn one. And we know that that's not really the wide variety that babies need to prevent picky eating. Now picky eating to some degree is inevitable. Your baby is going to experience some degree of picky eating, usually starting around the second year of life. So after you hit that one year, mark, almost all babies have some degree of picky eating, but here's the deal babies who have only 10 or 15 foods under their belt.

Katie Ferraro (2m 57s):

If they lose those 10 or 15 foods to picky eating in the second year, that becomes a very challenging child to feed. But if your baby has 100 different foods that they can safely eat, by the time they turn one, and then you lose 10 or 15, or even 20 of those foods to picky eating in the second year, it's no big deal, right? You may be still has 90 or 85 or 80 foods that they can safely eat. And so while we can't entirely prevent picky eating, getting your baby and taking advantage of what we call the honeymoon feeding phase, sometimes call this the flavor window. It's says, period between six and 15, some references even say 18 months of age, where babies will like and accept a wide variety of foods.

Katie Ferraro (3m 38s):

If we can take advantage of that by really pushing your baby's palate, getting them to that 100 First Foods mark. We know that as we move into toddlerhood, even if your baby does have some picky eating, it's not going to be as extreme as if you had just done a few foods. So that's kind of the overarching goal of why we're even aiming for 100 Foods. Now, is there any clinical significance to the number 100? Absolutely not. It's just a great benchmark that babies can aim for and it's actually very achievable. So the reason why I started with 100 Foods is in 2016, I was my, I had quadruplets and I really struggled with feeding my oldest daughter. She was 18 months when the quadruplets were born and I had started traditional spoon feeding and way too early.

Katie Ferraro (4m 21s):

And she hated being fed. And I hated feeding her and was kind of at the height of my feeding frustration. I was feeling like an ultimate failure as a mom, because what kind of mom can't feed their own baby, let alone a dietitian mom. It was right at the height of struggling to feed my daughter, Molly and my husband and I found out we were pregnant with quadruplets. And I remember thinking I can't even feed the one baby that I have at home right now. How in the heck am I going to feed four babies at one time? So fast forward when the quads turned six months adjusted age, I had really, really studied and analyzed everything I could about baby-led weaning when I was looking to an alternative to traditional or parent led spoon feeding, cause that did not work for my daughter. And I certainly didn't have the time or energy to do it for four babies.

Katie Ferraro (5m 4s):

So when the quad started with solid foods, we took a different approach, which was baby-led weaning. And I was kind of looking for a way, I'd read about a variety of different foods. And I kind of type A and I was like mapping out all the foods that I wanted them to eat. And at the same time, it was also helpful with my toddler. I wanted to continue introducing her to new foods cause she was a little on the picky side. So one of the benefits of baby-led weaning is it sometimes helps toddlers with exposure to foods because as the babies were learning how to eat, she was also eating the same foods. So with our approach to baby-led weaning, I started mapping out the different foods and I was looking for a way to continue to keep myself on a schedule. So it wasn't until I had quadruplets that I really appreciated a schedule with regard to feeding.

Katie Ferraro (5m 46s):

I mean, we had an intense, I was pumping for them, but also supplementing with formula. So was mixing bottles and feeding, you know, five, six bottles a day, times, four babies, and trying to keep everything straight. And when they were having their diapers changed and who'd had what kind of, if a diaper and who'd had how much, many ounces of formula and who got how much breast milk. So everything was mapped out on a schedule. I have a sister who's a nurse who was really sweet to make me a whole feeding schedule chart, which I'm actually going to link to in the show notes for this episode, because it was insane. But if you have multiples, I think having a chart for feeding is like the most important thing. If you go to blwpodcast/63, i'll link my quadruplet feeding chart because I couldn't remember anything if I wasn't writing it down. So it kind of carried that over to when we started solid foods, I was like, okay, I don't want to just be feeding them applesauce and bananas and sweet foods like fruit is fine, but it's only one category of food that babies can eat.

Katie Ferraro (6m 37s):

So I got into the habit of offering the babies five new foods a week. Sometimes parents will say, wait a minute. My doctor says you can only feed your baby every three to five days. And that's certainly not true. You can feed your baby low risk foods. So foods that are not potentially allergenic foods, you can do one new food a week or a day, rather if it's a low risk food. So in the program that I set up, I did for low-risk foods Monday to Thursday. So I do a new fruit on Monday, a new vegetable on Tuesday, a new starch on Wednesday, a new protein food on Thursday. And then every Friday I would feed what I called a challenge food. And the challenge foods included the big eight allergenic foods plus sesame as well as some of the trickier textures and more complex flavors profiles that babies weren't always exposed to.

Katie Ferraro (7m 21s):

And we'll do that on Friday, feed that food twice on Friday, twice on Saturday, twice on Sunday with no other new foods in between. I would certainly cycle back familiar foods that the babies had had previously. But I would build in that two to three day pad to observe for any potential reaction after introducing a potentially allergenic food on Friday. So the pattern again was for low-risk foods Monday to Thursday, and then that potentially allergenic food. And I started that right in week one, as you guys are probably aware of the research that shows that early and often introduction of allergenic foods can help prevent against food allergy. So right when you're starting solid foods, just get into the habit of introducing one of those allergenic foods per week. So I got us going on a cycle where we're doing five new foods per week.

Katie Ferraro (8m 1s):

If you do five new foods per week, that's basically 20 new foods per month. If you assume there's four weeks in a month. And if you multiply that times five months by the time your baby is 12 months of age or, you know, 11 months of age, you've offered 100 different foods. So it's a great way to stay on track with regards to introducing your baby to a variety of foods. You're feeding from five different food categories. That's a variety of tastes. It's a variety of textures. It's a variety of flavors. And you're also providing your baby with a variety of nutrients because it's important that your baby is getting all of the different nutrients from food. As they're learning how to eat as part of the weaning process is they'll become increasingly more reliant on food to meet their nutrition and less reliant on milk.

Katie Ferraro (8m 43s):

That's what happens during weaning your baby starts eating more food stops drinking as much milk. And as you approach the one-year mark, our ultimate goal is to have babies sitting at the table, eating modified versions of the same foods, the, of the family eats. But I like to remind parents that your baby doesn't just magically wake up on their first birthday and they know, know how to eat 100 different foods, right? You have to be practicing with them. And so that's what the 100 First Foods approach allows you, the opportunity for your baby to be exposed to these different foods. You're adding one new food every day, five days a week, 20 foods a month by the end five months, your baby's had 100 different foods. So in 2016, I did this approach with my quadruplets.

Katie Ferraro (9m 24s):

I remember I was doing a lot of social media at that time, just having four babies, doing anything at once is kind of a very appealing visual of, we had a pretty decent Instagram following and we were actually approaching, I remember approaching 100 thousand followers and I was talking to one of my colleagues that I worked with, like what would be a good way to celebrate 100 thousand followers? And I was like, wait a minute. It started counting the foods and realized without even having done it intentionally that the babies had actually eaten 100 Foods at around that point. So we decided to put the 100 Foods that they had eaten into a list that I then started giving away on my free baby led weaning for beginners workshop. So it all started out with Instagram kind of promotion, giving away the list and then realizing, wait a minute, formalizing a little bit more into a program.

Katie Ferraro (10m 9s):

And then fast forward another year and a half later, my husband and I had another set of multiples. I had baby twins, Gus and Hannah. And at that point, my quadruplets were more like toddlers. So even though I had shifted the focus of my nutrition practice and my business to baby-led weaning, my toddlers, weren't doing baby-led weaning anymore. They were eating regular toddler food. And so with Gus and Hannah, when they started solid foods, I wanted to start a separate Instagram that was dedicated just to baby-led weaning. Cause I didn't want to spam my family account, which was full of toddler stuff with baby food. That just seemed a little bit kind of out of order. So I started a second Instagram when Gus and Hannah started solid foods when they were six months adjusted age, that Instagram was called @babyledweanteam.

Katie Ferraro (10m 52s):

And that was like the home base for all things baby-led weaning. And so with Gus and Hannah, when I actually started that Instagram, that was in November of 2018, when they started solid foods, October, November, that Instagram started at nothing. And, but as dedicated fully to baby-led weaning. So I started that Instagram by documenting Gus in Hannah's 100 First Foods. So at that point I kind of formalized what I'd done with the quads into a more traditional program where the foods were outlined. And I was going in a particular order and I was documenting three posts a day with their new foods. So doing five new foods a week, three posts a day. So if you are following my instagram, @babyledweanteam. If you go all the way back to the beginning of the feed.

Katie Ferraro (11m 34s):

So at the time of this recording, that is about almost two years old, that Instagram account, and that's where all the 100 First Foods material with for Gus and Hannah started. So it was just started building that following by posting about the one new food they're eating each day, three posts a day. I would explain why in a video, I was feeding that food from a nutritional, your taste and texture, a second post that showed the babies actually eating it. So like here's a, baby's eating spinach as part of a palak paneer dish. Here's them picking it up and putting it in a mouth, just the visual here's them gagging on it, which has started doing a lot of gagging videos, which would kind of take off because parents were like first, they were freaked out like, oh my gosh, why is this baby choking? And then they realized the baby's not choking the baby's gagging and seeing videos of a baby gagging and recovering on their own.

Katie Ferraro (12m 18s):

Ended up being really helpful to parents and caregivers who are starting out with baby-led weaning. And then the third post each day would be the actual food. So here's how I prepared it. Here's went into it. Here's an overhead picture of it. Here's the ingredients, here's me cooking it. So there's three posts per food. So after doing that for a hundred days, I'd also tracking it in the highlights on Instagram. Again, it was more of a formalized program. And then, so that was 2018. At that point, I'd been working quite closely with colleague Dawn Winkelmann who's a speech language pathologist, a feeding specialist for the company, Ezpz many of you guys use the Ezpz products on their silicone suction matts and bowls. They make open cups and utensils spoons. Dawn designs a lot of their products as their feeding expert.

Katie Ferraro (12m 58s):

We hooked up because we had been doing a couple of other like workshops and courses together. And Dawn came on to help me formalize the 100 First Foods program as a digital program, the parents could then join to get help as they were moving their babies through these 100 First Foods as well, because it's fine to have a list of 100 Foods, but the application process of how do you safely eat these foods? That's where Dawn came in. Because as a registered dietitian, I'm fully equipped to talk to you guys about what foods baby should be eating from a nutrition and growth standpoint, but when it comes to how babies safely eat, that it's really Dawn's component as the speech-language pathologist and the feeding expert who's focuses on how babies learn to eat and how they learn to chew and helping to prevent choking.

Katie Ferraro (13m 42s):

That's all Dawn's wheelhouse. So she's on the what of how babies can eat. She's the how babies learn how to eat. And we'd started. We filmed 100 different foods that were inside of the 100 First Foods program with videos on how to safely select these foods, prepare them and offer them to the baby in a way that's safe because our overarching goal is to help prevent choking to help promote independent eating. But again, babies don't just wake up on their six month birthday and are able to eat lasagna safely. Hey, it doesn't work like that. We work the baby up to it. And so this whole formalized 100 First Foods approach came to be where Dawn and I. We started teaching the program formally in 2019.

Katie Ferraro (14m 22s):

We teach our 100 First Foods program, which is called the 100 First Foods field guide. We just teach it a few times each year because it is a digital program, but also has a live component where Dawn and I do a Facebook live every week inside of our private pop-up Facebook group for the 100 First Foods members. And we do live Q and A. So it's been so much fun to be there, live with parents and caregivers, answering their questions about my baby's gagging so much, or Hey, my baby doesn't seem to be interested in food at first. Or what do I do with my baby takes off a big bite and parents, they bring their babies and send us their videos. And we're there in live real time, helping them safely get through these 100 First Foods. So as I mentioned, we've been doing it. We do it a few times each year.

Katie Ferraro (15m 3s):

We just reopened the 100 First Foods field guide for the last time for 2020 at this recording. If you want to check it out, go to 100firstfoods.com, tell you all about the program. If you're interested in doing the 100 First Foods program with Dawn and myself, it's a fabulous community. If I do say so myself, incredibly supportive. And that's one thing I found when I got into baby-led weaning is that it wasn't an entirely supportive community. I felt like there was a lot of judgment or sometimes in these Facebook groups where you can't do this and you don't feed this and you never have spoons. And instead of really focusing on all the foods that babies can eat, I found that so much of the baby-led weaning materials out there were so negative and talking about what babies couldn't and shouldn't eat Dawn and I both teach and incorporate purees into our 100 First Foods approach.

Katie Ferraro (15m 49s):

Purees are an important texture for babies to learn how to master. However, they're not the only texture that babies can eat. So we do teach a preloaded spoon approach. We show you how babies can safely learn to drink purees out of an open cup on, but we also incorporate lots of trickier textures, more challenging foods like meats. Some of the more complex flavor profile foods are in our program as well. Foods that babies aren't as inclined to eat. If they're just having, you know, the four or five standard ingredients that you would find in pouches. So it's been an absolute pleasure watching your babies eat 100 First Foods are, my phone is just full. I said the other day to my husband. He's like, I was like, if anything happened to me and you like someone found my phone, they'd be like, what is this woman's phone full of other pictures of other people's babies, gagging eating, all sorts of foods that babies aren't eating, don't think that they traditionally eat.

Katie Ferraro (16m 38s):

And then we do a lot of work now with allergic reactions. So parents will send me pictures of the allergic reactions that their babies have had to different foods. And I share them along with gagging videos because seeing really is believing right? Seeing, you know, you might not believe that babies can safely eat sardines or beets, or how do we feed liver safely? And there is some gagging along the way on men. A lot of parents are scared by that, but they start to realize that, you know, gagging is an important and necessary and natural part of learning how to eat. We help parents get over their fear of gagging. We help them get over their fear of introducing the allergenic foods and really helping to raise an independent eater. And one of the interesting side effects of the 100 First Foods approach is a lot of parents will write and say, this is something that helped me increase my palate as well.

Katie Ferraro (17m 18s):

Or my husband was really picky. And through this, he's actually been exposed to new foods for other families. They want to be cooking and preparing food more at home. This is kind of the excuse to do so because you can eat at a restaurant with your baby, but when we're starting out, it is better to do individual foods without added sodium. And we teach you how to season foods that don't have sodium in them. And you can always add salt to it later if you want to as the adult, but for a lot of families, this approach has been helpful in expanding their pallet as well, helping them with picky eating. Also a lot of families, they find baby-led weaning with their second or their subsequent kid. I know in my case, my oldest daughter, Molly, we really struggled with spoon feeding her and dealing with her picky, eating as a toddler. And I didn't want to replicate that when I went to feed my quadruplets and then my twins.

Katie Ferraro (18m 2s):

And so there is the side effect that the toddlers end up eating better as well. When they're incorporated in family meals, where the babies are starting to eat a wide variety of foods. So that's another benefit of this approach. And we've also worked with families, babies of all different abilities. We have a number of families of babies that have down syndrome on a lot of babies who had previously been on tube feeds, or they were weaning off of the tube feeding and they wanted you to baby-led weaning. They were told me by their feeding team, oh, you can't do that. We actually would work with the feeding team and help them through the weaning process t have those babies be eating these 100 different foods as well, sometimes on a different timeline, but it's been fascinating watching everyone else's babies get to the 100 First Food mark generally by the time they turn one.

Katie Ferraro (18m 43s):

Sometimes even before that, some parents get a little bit of a later start. And this is a program that works for older babies as well. There's no magic to having done it by the first year. So a lot of parents will really relish in the fact that when their baby turns one, they've hit that milestone. They can sit at the table with their baby and the baby is eating modified versions of the same foods that the rest of the family is eating. So that's just a little history of how the 100 First Foods program came to be. Again, it's a digital program that Dawn Winkelman and myself teach a few times a year. It's open for enrollment right now. If you go to 100firstfoods.com, if you're catching this episode, after the enrollment period has closed, we'll be offering it a few times in the future.

Katie Ferraro (19m 25s):

Again, we just do it a few times each year for a limited group of parents and caregivers. So we can really focus our attention and time on them in our private group, where we do a weekly Q and A, and we're there to give you one-on-one support to help you get your baby to the 100 First Foods, mark, which again can help you raise an independent eater, help you prevent picky eating. And I think most of all, the takeaway message from the 100 First Foods approach is to really help parents and caregivers have fun feeding their baby and focus on all the foods that babies can eat. Instead of focusing on the things that they shouldn't be eating. The thanks for listening guys, check out the show notes for this episode blwpodcast.com/63 and the 100 First Foods program.

Katie Ferraro (20m 7s):

If you want to learn more is now open for enrollment at 100firstfoods.com take care. Bye now.