Paediatric dietician Jenny Douglas talks to Susie about how to best nourish infants and young children. Jenny runs her own private practice, Jump Start Nutrition in Dunedin. She specialises in infant feeding, food allergies and intolerance, fussy eating and gut health. She has contributed to Nadia Lim's new book Yum which focuses of recipes and nutrition for the whole family.

Creating a relaxed environment will greatly benefit babies and toddlers while eating, allowing them to get used to new food and help them get the nourishment they require, paediatric dietician Jenny Douglas says

She talks to Nine to Noon about how to best nourish infants and young children.

Douglas runs her own private practice, Jump Start Nutrition in Dunedin.

no caption

Listen to the conversation

She specialises in infant feeding, food allergies and intolerance, fussy eating and gut health. She has contributed to Nadia Lim's new book Yum, which focuses of recipes and nutrition for the whole family.

Listen to the conversation

There has been much talk recently about introducing vegetables instead of fruit in the transition from milk to solid foods.

Douglas says this makes sense, as the infant is already familiar with sweet flavours from the breast milk, and getting the child used to other flavours is beneficial in the long run.

"Some of those are what we have in vegetables. So, introducing vegetables first can be a really good way of introducing savoury and bitter flavours."

Introducing iron in foods, such as meats, chicken, lentils is important too

There are two approaches when doing so, namely puree the food, or go with the bady-led method, with hand-held foods.Starch vegetables work well, like sweet potatoes and carrots, and bitter flavoured soft vegetable like broccolis. Spinach is a great source of iron that can be blended to puree.

Finger foods are also important for texture for babies as it forms part of speech development, as they learn to chew foods well.

"They use their muscles in their mouth, which is really important for speech later on, which we need kind of make sure that they're at least chewing on chopped-up family foods by that 10-12 months age, because it means they're developing those chewing and biting skills."

Six months is the recommended point of considering solids, but all babies develop at different rates, she says.

Parents don't want to introduce solids before four months because the gut is too immature to cope with solids…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details