Katie Ferraro (1m 40s):

The key with meat is moisture. Any dry food, but particularly dry proteins in dark dry starchy foods can be a huge choking hazard for Baby. So we want to offer the really moist meats and it makes a great soft shreddable moist meat product that you're even six months old can eat safely. 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, leading you with the competence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (2m 24s):

Hey guys, welcome back today. We're talking about Red Meat and Red Meat that your Baby Can Safely Eat. Now, why would you want to feed red meat to your baby? Well, if you are from a family where you eat animal foods and you're interested in having your baby Safely learn how to eat these foods, there's a lot of different reasons why we would feed Red Meat. I'm going to be talking about white meat in the next episode, but I'll explain the difference between the two here today. If you're a vegan or if you don't eat animal foods, for whatever reason, health, religion, personal conviction, ethical environmental, et cetera, then this might not be the episode for you, but if you're looking for some ideas of ways, your baby can safely eat red meat. I've got some tips for you here inside this episode. So let's start with classification. What is the difference between red meat and white meat?

Katie Ferraro (3m 6s):

So red meat and white meat differ because of their amounts of myoglobin. Now, myoglobin is a protein that carries oxygen to the cells of the body. It's usually found in the heart and the skeletal muscles. Okay. So the myoglobin amount determines red versus white meat, but an easier way to think of it is that red meat is a livestock. So the livestock animals, beef lamb, pork veal, okay. I'm not going to cover feel today, Pork. Some of you might be like, hold up. I thought Pork was the other white meat. I'm going to explain what that ad campaign is all about in a second, but I want to recommend some cuts of beef and lamb and pork that I particularly like for baby led weaning. And we just had a fabulous guest of Butcher fourth generation Butcher car Nicoletti.

Katie Ferraro (3m 47s):

She was on the last episode, 176. If you want to learn more about the particular cuts of meat, that's a great one there, but I'm going to review the top Red Meat ones in today's episode, just for those of you who might be at the meat counter or at a Butcher or at your grocery store. And you're like, ah, I don't know what kind of meat to buy for my baby. All right. So the meat from four legged animals, beef, pork, lamb veal, those are generally considered our red meats. Now, are they different from white meats from a nutrition standpoint? Not really, or in a way that doesn't really matter that much. Okay. There's technically some more iron in red meats compared to white meats, but I don't want you guys to discount white meat because of course, all animal foods contain iron.

Katie Ferraro (4m 27s):

And the type of iron that we find in animal foods is more well absorbed by the human body than is the type of iron that we find in plant foods. So both red and white meats have iron, but ounce for ounce red meat tends to have more iron than the white meats do. So let's talk about the cuts of red meat that work well for baby led weaning when it comes to beef. Okay, I'm a firm believer that most foods can be made safe for babies. Okay, but not all cuts of meat are created equal. And certainly not all meat preparation methods are appropriate for babies, especially our early eaters at six and seven months of age. So I'm going to share the cuts of meat that give you the final product. That's soft, shreddable strips of meat that even early eaters can safely chew and swallow even without teeth.

Katie Ferraro (5m 12s):

Okay. I personally do not offer solid pieces of meat like steak. So think of a steak that you would grill on the grill and then cut it with a steak knife. If I can't easily shred it between my finger and my thumb, then I'm not comfortable giving it to my baby to chew with their gums. So cuts of meat that I like from beef include brisket, brisket with a nice fat cap on top, when you cook it especially low and slow and that fat liquefies, and then those protein fibers from the brisket start breaking down. You get a nice soft, moist shreddable final product. That's safe for babies to eat. The key with meat is moisture, right? Any dry food, but particularly dry protein.

Katie Ferraro (5m 53s):

Then try starchy foods can be a huge choking hazard for Baby. So we want to offer the really moist meats and brisket makes a great soft shreddable moist meat product that your even six months old can eat Safely. And that you might like as well. Another cut of beef that I love is Chuck rose in back in episode 176, we talked a little bit about Chuck roast with Carra the Butcher, but that's one of my favorite cuts because it's so easy to make you put a bunch of low sodium broth in your slow cooker or even your instant pot and 90 minutes in the instant pot or a pressure cooker eight hours or so for Chuck roast, slow cooked on high nice shreddable soft pieces of strips of meat that you can offer in sizes about that of your adult pinky finger loved that for baby led weaning from the beef counter.

Katie Ferraro (6m 35s):

I also love country-style beef rips. You can get country-style pork ribs. Those are great as well. Nice combination of fat and lean are really easy to cook, super affordable cut of meat. And then I also do like ground meat and for a lot of parents, ground meat, I always kind of call it the gateway meat for baby led weaning. That's a wonderful option for you as well. And I do have a blog post that contains five ground meat recipes for baby led weaning. It's one of the most traffic articles on my site. And I'm going to link to that if you want to get some ground beef recipes that work well for early eaters at six or seven months of age, head to the show notes page for this episode at BLW podcast.com/176. And I will link to that blog post where you can get yourself some ground beef recipes, Okay.

Katie Ferraro (7m 18s):

So BLW cuts of red meat starting with beef. I love brisket. Chuck roast, beef country-style ribs and ground beef. Now what about lamb? Do a lot of content on lamb. I always offer baby lamb in the first week of baby led weaning people always like, why do you do that? Just to show you okay, that Babies can safely eat many more foods than we think is possible. But lamb is a wonderful type of meat for babies, very unique flavor, nice high fat content. So it makes us nice that I was talking about the moist outcome or final product that makes it so much easier for babies to swallow than like our really, really dry, dry lean proteins from lamb. I love ground lamb cause you can grind any type of meat, right? I love the lamb shank or leg of lamb roast.

Katie Ferraro (8m 0s):

And you can do that either boneless or bone in tends to be a little bit on the pricier side. So it's probably like not something I'm using on a weekly basis, but if you can get your hands on a Lego lamb roast, boneless or bone in super, super, a great final outcome, if you cook it low and slow, okay, we don't want to have those solid pieces of meat that we can't easily shred. I also do like lamb ribs. They're kind of unusual and you don't find them as frequently. So I think the leg of lamb roast will probably be the most commonly available for most people. And if you're interested in learning more about lamb, I have a whole episode that I did about lamb it's episode 1 65. It's called lamb. How to safely prepare lamb for baby LED WEANING the Alaska category of Red Meat that I'm gonna cover today is Pork.

Katie Ferraro (8m 40s):

I absolutely love Pork for Baby Led Weaning and did a whole episode on pork episode 1 75. That's all about how to safely Prepare Pork for Baby Led, Weaning blood, boil it down for you in like one sentence, hands down. Favorite cut of Pork for Baby Led. Weaning is a pork butt pork, but also called a Boston butt, a pork very similar, super high fat content. Super easy to cook. You end up with really nice soft shreddable strips of meat. Serve it with a lot of the cooking juice that you made it with. Low sodium broth Babies. Absolutely love it. That's Pork. So I like pork, but AKA pork, Boston butt or pork shoulder pork country-style ribs are also another great option. People ask about ribs a lot when I do a separate episode on ribs, cause there's a lot of rib nuances might have Carra the Butcher come back.

Katie Ferraro (9m 22s):

Cause she's way better at talking about ribs than I am, but kind of depends on how you cook your ribs and then what the finished product is. Okay. I generally don't offer babies meat on the bone until they have at least one tooth. You certainly could. I just think it's a lot more of an efficient operation for babies to extract meat from the bone when they have a tooth, generally, you know, that could happen anytime, right? Babies can actually be born with teeth for some babies, don't even get their teeth til one. So having or not having teeth has no bearing on whether or not your baby is ready to eat. I just personally feel more comfortable waiting for me on the bone until after baby has a tooth. All right. So I want to wrap up by talking about the Pork white meat kind of controversy things, not really controversy, but when we're talking about red meats and people are like, why are you concluding pork?

Katie Ferraro (10m 3s):

Well, pork as it comes from a pig, which does technically livestock and because of the myoglobin content quote unquote counts as a Red meat, but you might be familiar with the ad campaign for the national pork board, at least in the United States. It started in 1987 and the tagline is pork, the other white meat. So when people think about pork, they're like, well, I don't think about it as a Red Meat. It technically is a Red Meat, but then why would the pork board put millions of dollars behind the tagline, pork, the other white meat and the origination that think about it when it came out in 1987. Okay. We're just ahead of the 1990s. When everything in the 1990s was all about low fat, right? The American heart association and all the dieticians were talking about eat a low fat diet. Okay. And what happened when all Americans eat a low fat diet, took all the fat out of everything, put a ton of sugar back into the processed foods and Americans got fatter.

Katie Ferraro (10m 49s):

Okay. We know that the amount of fat in a diet doesn't really matter, thankfully we've moved away from the low fat era, but the original notion of that pork, the other white meat ad campaign was to dispel the idea of pork being a fatty meat. And if you think about a pig, there are a lot of fatty cuts from a pig, right? Like think about ham and think about bacon, but there are some other cuts of pork that are leaner. So the pork board was trying to highlight or spotlight pork as a lean protein. Okay. And according to the pork board, I don't know if I believe this or not, but the pork, the other white meat tagline is the fifth, most memorable promotional tagline in the history of commercial advertising.

Katie Ferraro (11m 30s):

I don't know how they ranked that stuff, but I was looking it up in preparation for the episode. It's actually still an ongoing campaign. You used to see like pork, you remember there was beef it's what's for dinner. That was like the beef checkoff tagline. And then the kind of the other response to it was from Pork, which was Pork, the other white meat. Again, just trying to get Americans to think of pork as a food that you would use regularly, like chicken and then thinking of in the same vein as chicken, which of has kind of like quote unquote health halo, whether or not it's deserved. We'll cover that in the next episode, which will be all about white meat. So hopefully guys, you learned a little bit about some Red Meat. Your Baby Can Safely Eat for baby led weaning. I'm gonna link up a couple other episodes that are also about meat and like iron.

Katie Ferraro (12m 11s):

I did a whole episode on iron, which was episode 137. That one is about, can my baby get enough iron from baby led weaning foods. We talk a lot about meat in there also episode 153, which is about zinc, how to get enough zinc from baby led weaning foods because meats are one of the few places where you can get a pretty good amount of zinc. You can't get it elsewhere, but MEAT is rich in zinc episode 19 is all about meat and how to safely prepare meat for baby LED WEANING. And then of course, episode 1 65 about lamb and 1 75 about Pork. If you guys need to brush up on some meat knowledge before you start feeding your babies, hope you guys enjoyed that episode about Red Meat. Everything I mentioned inside of the episode will be linked on the show notes. That's at BLW podcast.com/ 177.

Katie Ferraro (12m 51s):

See you next time for whitening.