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

Katie Ferraro (0s):

Are you trying to squeeze the starting solid food stuff into your already busy schedule? Well, I have an all-in-one done for you solution that's going to take the guesswork out of feeding your baby. My online program is called Baby Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro contains all of my baby led weaning training videos, the original a hundred First Foods content library, plus a hundred day meal plan with recipes like the exact sequence of which foods to feed in which order. So If you wanna stop trying to piece all this feeding stuff together on your own, I would be honored If you would join me inside of the program. You can get signed up at babyledweaning.co/program. And many times I'll encounter families, particularly of older babies and I'll say, oh my gosh, my baby only eats fruit. And kind of do some exploration and talk about, you know, the history of how the baby was fed.

Katie Ferraro (42s):

And they used to do a wide variety of foods, but then they kind of stopped doing the protein foods 'cause they didn't have enough time to make the meats and then they really weren't doing the whole grains 'cause some of those whole grains are a little bit more challenging to make safe. And then they got down to just doing the fruits and vegetables and then they kind of stopped doing the vegetables and now they're left with a baby who will only eat fruit. Well, if we only offer fruit to babies, they only have the opportunity to eat fruits. But the importance of diet diversity is that we're offering as many vegetable opportunities as we do fruits, and that's the key to helping your baby accept a wider array of foods and to eventually achieve diet diversity. 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 with Katie Ferraro podcast.

Katie Ferraro (1m 27s):

I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, giving you the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using Baby led weaning. Have you ever heard the advice that you should not give your baby fruit before vegetables because it will make them crave or have an affinity for sweet foods? Maybe there's a well-meaning grandparent or even another parent who told you that starting solid foods with fruit will give your baby a sweet tooth, but is that actually true or is this just another one of those baby feeding myths? In today's episode, we're gonna break down this idea And I'm gonna explain to you why babies do naturally prefer sweet flavors from birth.

Katie Ferraro (2m 10s):

We'll talk about what the research actually says about introducing fruit before vegetables, and most importantly, I'm gonna explain how you can serve fruit in a way that supports a balanced diet for your baby. Plus we'll cover why fruit juice is totally unnecessary for babies, along with some practical tips for serving fruits safely. So if you've been wondering whether fruit is your baby's friend or your foe when you're starting solid foods, stick around because I have got the facts for you. And If you like learning about food and science and how they intersect at this junction where your baby's transitioning to solid food, please be sure to follow this podcast. I put out two new episodes each week, a solo baby led weaning training episode every Monday, and then a longer interview episode with another feeding expert every Thursday.

Katie Ferraro (2m 54s):

So be sure to follow the show wherever you're listening or watching to this from so that you'll get notified each time an episode is live. And if baby led weaning is new to you and you have no idea what this whole thing is about, the best place to get started is my free online workshop called Baby Led Weaning for Beginners. This is an online video training where I'm gonna show you which foods are safe for babies, how we do not prepare food. I'll give you some sample menus for the first few days, and everybody on that free workshop gets a copy of my original 100 First Foods list, so you'll never run out of ideas of foods your baby could eat. You can sign up for the workshop at babyledweaning.co/workshop. You can take it right now or after this episode later today, tomorrow when your baby naps, whatever works for you.

Katie Ferraro (3m 34s):

Again, the link to register for that free online workshop is at babyledweaning.co/workshop. And If you are ready to start making all of the foods on that 100 First Foods list, including the vegetables as well as the fruits, my comprehensive online program is called Baby Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro. It has all of the videos and instructions and recipes. I'm making all of the foods on my original a 100 FIRST FOODS list, safe for your baby's age and stage. I also have a 100 First Foods Daily Meal Plan for those of you who don't even wanna think about which food you need to offer your baby. Next, you can get started today and sign up for the program at babyledweaning.co/program. Now, I like to start each of these mini training episodes with a baby led weaning tip of the day.

Katie Ferraro (4m 17s):

And today's tip is babies do not need fruit juice. Okay? In fact, it took like a really long time for the American Academy of Pediatrics to come around on this one and say it outright, okay? But we don't do any fruit juice for babies. Why? Just like with adults, okay? Babies can eat their fruit, they don't need to drink it, okay? We don't want super concentrated sources of sweet foods. Even fruit, which is a hundred percent natural fruit, that fruit sugar fructose, that's fine when it comes from fruit because that sugar is gonna be tempered by the fiber in that fruit. But when you offer your baby fruit juice, unfortunately all that fiber is removed and you're just giving them that big bolus of sugar, and we don't want that. So babies drink infant milk, that's breast milk and or formula can also do a little water later in infancy.

Katie Ferraro (5m 1s):

The next episode, episode 24, talks about water and when to offer your baby water. But suffice it to say that babies do not need juice, but hang tight, because in this episode I'm gonna talk about how to make fruit into finger foods that your baby can eat. Okay? Even If you think the fruit is a little too hard or unripe at first, I'll teach you a little pro tip there. Now, I'm gonna tell you guys a quick story talking about Pouches, okay? One of the problem with Pouches, And I don't shame people who use Pouches, Pouches are a great convenience food. They are a sometimes food if you're traveling or you're super stuck or there's nothing else real food wise for your baby to eat. Yeah, Pouches in moderation are fine. If you do do Pouches though, I'd highly encourage you do not allow your baby to suck out of the pouch, okay?

Katie Ferraro (5m 42s):

We squeeze the pouch into a bowl, put the product from the pouch, which is always a puree onto a preloaded spoon, and allow the baby to feed it that way. Okay? If you have questions about Pouches, I've got a great episode I did with Dawn Winkleman, who's a good friend of mine and a speech language pathologist, and we did an episode all about Pouches. It's episode 149. It's called Why Your Baby Doesn't Need To Suck Pureed Food Out of Pouches, and you can find that https://blwpodcast.com/episodes/149. Okay and in that episode, we talk about a lot of reasons, both from her SLP standpoint and my dietitian standpoint why we do not love Pouches. And one of the reasons I did not love Pouches, in addition to the fact that your baby is not actually interacting with the real food, okay?

Katie Ferraro (6m 22s):

When you see a kale baby food pouch, you know there's only a very tiny bit of kale in there, right? I will show you how to make kale safe for your baby, okay? We don't offer raw leafy green vegetables to babies because it is a choking hazard, but oftentimes those Bitter Vegetables, they're in small quantities in the pouch, and then there's, they're bathed in applesauce or pear puree. And what the manufacturers are doing there is they're masking the taste of the food that If you prepared it safely for your baby, your baby would just eat kale. Okay? Now you have to again, modify it to make it safe, but the point is, we don't need to cover bitter tasting vegetables in sweet tastes like applesauce or pears in order to get babies to eat it.

Katie Ferraro (7m 4s):

Manufacturers do that, and then parents say, oh my gosh, my baby loves this brand of kale pouch. No, they don't. They just love the green colored applesauce that it really is. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

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Katie Ferraro (8m 60s):

Today I wanna talk about why babies gravitate towards sweet foods, what the benefits are that both fruits and vegetables convey. What does the research say about doing fruit versus vegetables first? And then I'll give you some tips on how to make fruits and vegetables safe no matter what age or stage your baby is at, provided that they're really showing you the reliable signs of readiness to eat. Okay? Because sometimes parents love Pouches like, oh, I just squeeze it in my baby's mouth. Well, how old's your baby four months of age? Well, four and five month old babies are not safe to swallow anything except infant milk. Can we wait until your baby is six months of age plus showing the other reliable signs of readiness to eat? And then when they are, guess what? They can eat real foods and you don't need to offer them highly packaged, processed purees out of Pouches.

Katie Ferraro (9m 40s):

That's a lot of peace. Why do babies gravitate towards sweet foods? Well, babies are naturally inclined towards sweet tastes. Okay? They have a preference that it's thought to be evolutionary. Okay? If you think If you ever tasted your own breast milk or whoever else's breast milk is laying around breast milk formula, these are sweet foods, right? The natural sugar in breast milk is lactose, okay? Ends in OSE. It is a sugar, it is naturally sweet. Fructose is a natural sweetener that we find in fruit. So babies do have that tendency towards the sweeter taste because of the lactose, the naturally occurring milk sugar that is the base carbohydrate in both human milk as well as in commercial infant formula. Okay? The sweetness indicates that that's an energy rich food, okay?

Katie Ferraro (10m 21s):

Energy being calories. Okay? So there's this innate liking for sweetness. It exists regardless of the order in which foods are introduced, okay? And there are some, like, there's such cool research out there where researchers will study, like they'll inject a sweet versus a different flavor into the amniotic fluid, and then they count the number of gulps that the baby takes to indicate if they have a preference for sweetness. It's not like highly scientific, but I think it's pretty cool. I actually did an episode with a scientist who specializes in taste preference. If you go to episode 316, it's called taste preference in babies. When and How do They Develop? It's with Alison Ventura. She's a PhD researcher, but her background is, she worked in like taste development at a taste lab, and it's really cool when she describes like how your baby actually develops their taste.

Katie Ferraro (11m 9s):

So If you like that, you know, child development stuff, especially like in utero and how researchers think, basically from the time you are in your your mother's womb, you had a natural innate preference for sweet foods. Are we trying to break the baby of this preference for sweet foods by only offering them vegetables? No, because both fruits and vegetables do convey very beneficial things, right? They offer taste and texture opportunities. They offer nutrition and different nutrients in, you know, two episodes ago, episode 21, we talked about three ways to boost your baby's iron absorption. And one of them is offer iron containing foods, both plant and animal foods that have iron along with vitamin C foods like fruits and vegetables, okay? We don't just offer them for the vitamin C, but among all the other good things that fruits and vegetables have, it's the potential to help your baby absorb iron from the other iron containing foods that you're offering.

Katie Ferraro (11m 58s):

Remember that learning how to eat is a full sensory experience. Bright colors of those fruits and vegetables, they're both wonderful, but one is not better than the other. Okay? There is no hard and fast research that says you have to introduce vegetables before fruit or your baby will have an affinity for sweet taste. I hate to break it to you, your baby has already been exposed to sweet taste, right? When mom's pregnant baby is exposed to different flavor compounds via the amniotic fluid when you are breastfeeding, the composition of mom's diet determines different flavor compounds transferring through breast milk that the baby has been exposed to. Sometimes parents will say, well, I've heard that a baby might need to see a food 10 or 15 times before they like or accept it.

Katie Ferraro (12m 39s):

Okay? And what they'll interpret that is, oh, I need to give my baby broccoli 15 different ways before they like it. Okay? Now the truth is we do wanna offer a variety of foods and lots of opportunities, but I would encourage you to be more balanced in this approach versus counting the number of times that you're offering a food, which is kind of ironic coming from the person who started the idea of counting the number of foods that your baby eats. But you don't have to count the number of times that you do it, and you don't have to offer that food 15 different times. What I would encourage you to do is offer as many vegetable opportunities as you do fruit opportunities. Sometimes parents, especially of older babies, will come to me and say, but Katie, my baby only eats fruit. And then we'll do a deep dive into what foods are being offered and like, well, if you're only offering fruit, ha, how's the baby Have any opportunities?

Katie Ferraro (13m 23s):

Eat vegetables. Well, fruit's so much easier. Or we used to do vegetables, but he doesn't like them. Don't give up. Stand your ground. If you're following my five step feeding framework, we offer five new foods each week, a new fruit on Monday, a new vegetable on Tuesday, a new starchy food on Wednesday, a new protein food on Thursday, and a new allergenic food on Friday. Don't give up. Some parents will do a couple weeks of that and be like, okay, I'm good. And then they default to only doing fruits and vegetables, and then they cut the vegetables out. And then guess what? They've got a 1-year-old who only drinks milk and eats fruit. That is not a well-balanced diet. That child is at risk for nutrition deficiencies, And that child is very likely going to have to go to feeding therapy because they haven't had the opportunity to explore the wide variety of foods out there. So don't just give fruits and vegetables.

Katie Ferraro (14m 5s):

Don't forget about those other food categories. Now, as far as the other research shows, there's one study that looked at a variety of different prospective analysis supporting the hypothesis that early taste and texture experience influence your subsequent food preferences and acceptances. Okay? And what researchers have found is that a variety of fruits and vegetables at early ages are important strategies to help older people later in life achieve what we call diet diversity. Basically when you're three, you're not gonna wake up if you've only ever had highly processed soft carbohydrate foods and be like, dude, give me some Brussels sprouts. Okay? We take advantage of the flavor window. This all important period where your baby will like and accept a wide variety of foods by offering a variety of foods.

Katie Ferraro (14m 49s):

Okay? There's another study that looked at, it's called The Variety is the Spice of Life. And it was looking at strategies for promoting fruit and vegetable acceptance during infancy, and sometimes that word acceptance to kind of just like, it's like it like rubs me the wrong way. It's like nails on the chalkboard. Like it is not our job to make the baby accept it. It is our job as parents to offer a variety of foods, right? If we follow Ellyn Satter's division of Responsibility and Feeding theory, we the parents, the caregivers, were responsible for what the baby eats and when they eat and where they eat, okay? But our babies are ultimately responsible for how much or even whether they eat. But this particular study, babies got exposed to a particular fruit for eight days, okay? Those babies in that group tended to have a greater liking and consumption of that fruit after the exposure.

Katie Ferraro (15m 31s):

In another study, the babies were given the particular vegetable for eight days and they resulted in having a liking and consuming that vegetable more often. Okay? And what these findings suggest is that infants may be able to distinguish flavors, but having repeated opportunities to taste fruits and vegetables can promote their willingness to consume them. Okay? And that's kind of at the crux of the 100 First Foods approach to starting solid foods. It's not a hundred fruits, okay? There's a hundred foods, but they come in five different food categories and we're offering an equal number of vegetable opportunities as we are fruits, okay? And it helps you kind of stay on track for getting through, especially all of those Bitter Vegetables. There's a lot of parents who won't do Bitter Vegetables, namely because they don't even know what a bitter vegetable is.

Katie Ferraro (16m 14s):

They don't know how to prepare it. But the 100 First Foods program is packed with Bitter Vegetables because it is amazing what babies will eat. And If you wanna learn a little bit more about Bitter Vegetables, episode 155 is all about How to Safely Offer Bitter Vegetables for Baby led weaning. You can find that at https://blwpodcast.com/episodes/155. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

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Katie Ferraro (17m 0s):

One thing I also want to remind you when it comes to the research is a lot of the research about variety and diet diversity talks about picky eating. And I want you to remember that picky eating in toddlerhood is developmentally appropriate. Picky eating is not a problem to be fixed. There's some studies that show prevalence data for picky eating and toddlers as high as 50%. Okay? So a lot of times parents think like, oh my gosh, I'm a total failure. I have a picky eater. If you think about it, conventional adult-led spoonfeeding results in babies who've had at most eight or 10 foods by the time they turn one. Okay? And if your baby is typically developing when they turn one and become a toddler, at some point they will exhibit some signs of picky eating.

Katie Ferraro (17m 41s):

And if they only have eight or 10 foods and you lose those foods to picky eating, that becomes a very challenging child to feed. But if your baby has a hundred foods that they can eat and then you lose 10 or 15 of those to picky eating, it's no big deal, right? Because your baby still has 85 or 90 foods that they can eat. So I would really, really, really encourage you to stick to your guns about offering a variety of foods. Try to offer as many vegetable offerings as you do fruits. If you're following my five step feeding framework where you do a new fruit on Monday and a new vegetable on Tuesday, a new starchy food on Wednesday, a new protein on Thursday, and a new allergenic food on Friday, you do that for 20 weeks. In five short months, your baby will have eaten a hundred different foods and you will have offered as many vegetables you will have gotten through all of the allergenic foods.

Katie Ferraro (18m 24s):

They will not have a preference for fruit. Now, we sometimes deal with older babies who maybe the parents have fallen off the rails or they stopped trying all the different foods, or they just got tired, and we're only doing fruit. If your baby is having a preference for fruit, I recommend taking what I call a Fruit Vacation. If you'd like to learn about Fruit Vacation, go to episode 209. It's called Fruit Vacation, How to Help Babies Who Overly Favor Fruit. There's a lot of helpful tips in there. That's at https://blwpodcast.com/episodes/209. In summary, offering fruit before vegetables will not make your baby quote unquote crave sweet foods, but I would encourage you to be diligent about offering an equivalent number of vegetable opportunities as you do fruits.

Katie Ferraro (19m 8s):

Steer clear of fruit juice for babies. I have lots of tips on how to make all of the fruits safe for Baby Led Weaning. And my best tip for you, If you got a fruit, like I was thinking about Mango the other day. I was having a baby over, and then the mom wanted to do mango, so I usually get my mango from Costco, but of course, it's never ripe. It's like literally rock hard when you get it from Mango, but it is one of the few convenience foods I'll pay for because I hate peeling and cutting mango. And they do it for you at Costco, but it's never ready. Poach the fruit, okay? Poaching is when you simmer something in a little bit of water and when you poach fruit, it makes it nice and soft. You get it fork tender, and it's super easy for the baby to eat that food. If you wanna learn more about poaching foods, I did an entire episode on poaching foods.

Katie Ferraro (19m 51s):

I'll tell you how to make these five foods safer for your baby by poaching. That's episode 315. So If you go to https://blwpodcast.com/episodes/315, you can learn everything you want about poaching. If you wanna get started and making all the vegetables as well as the fruit safe for your baby, please check out My program, Baby Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro at babyledweaning.co/program. Thank you so much for listening. I got all the show notes from this episode up at https://blwpodcast.com/episodes/23, and a special thank you to our partners at AirWave Media. If you like podcasts that feature food and science in using your brain, check out some of the shows from AirWave. We are online at blwpodcast.com. Thanks for listening, And I'll see you next time.

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