It is best to start with soft and sweet tasting fruits such as apples or pears.
The WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding until six months of age. From then on, it’s normal that the child’s stomach is already prepared to receive other foods than milk, so from that age is when paediatricians recommend to start introducing other foods in the baby’s diet and, in that sense, fruits and vegetables are the first on the list. But how to do it?
Fruits and vegetables, what to introduce first?
Surely, the first question you are asking yourself is, do I start with fruits or vegetables first? Well, the Spanish Association of Paediatrics recommends starting with vegetables, which don’t cause so many allergies. However, the situation may arise when your paediatrician advises you to start with the fruit
If this is your case, it’s also possible that the doctor recommends you to start with juice. Starting with an orange or a tangerine squeezed may be the ideal choice, either natural or purchased, as long as these don’t include added sugars, dyes, flavourings or preservatives, such as Nutribén juices. For this, the ideal is to give the fruits in small tablespoons, little by little and gradually and never in a bottle. The moment when you offer it is also important. The ideal is to do it between milk and after nap, because they get up thirsty.
If, on the other hand, you prefer to introduce the fruit in the baby’s diet in a puree format, it’s important that the first purees are made are of a single fruit, to then start adding other varieties over the time. In this way you can identify if your baby is allergic to any fruit.
It is best to start with soft and sweet tasting fruits such as apples or pears.
Which fruit should be introduced first in the children’s diet?
It’s best to start with fruits with a soft and sweet flavour, such as apple or pear. When you see that the child already eats them without problems, you can go introducing the rest: banana, orange ….
However, there are certain varieties that can cause allergies, so it’s advisable that you serve them one by one after your child has more than a year. These are: kiwi, strawberries, peach, berries and tropical fruits.
The vegetable in the baby’s diet
Six months is also the age at which you have to start introducing the vegetables in the baby’s diet. However, and as with fruits, it must be done gradually. Therefore, the appropriate vegetables to start at the age of 6 months are: green bean, zucchini, squash, potato and sweet potato. Always introducing them one by one in order to know if any cause allergy, gas, constipation, diarrhoea.
The way to prepare them is to cook them with little water, without salt and with a little oil, preferably olive oil.
Around the year, the time has come to introduce green leafy vegetables, such as spinach and Swiss chard; and others such as cauliflower, cabbage and broccoli.
You can add other types of foods such as meats and fish to these vegetable purées as time passes. So, after six months you can add cooked chicken to the mashed potatoes. A few weeks later, you can make vegetable purees with other types of meat: lamb, turkey or rabbit….
The last food that must be incorporated in the purées is white fish, such as hake, sole… Of course, make sure that before adding fish to the vegetables it has been previously frozen and doesn’t have bones.