MMP 304: Baby Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro

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Hi, friends. Welcome to the Modern Mamas Podcast. We are two modern mamas here to inspire empowerment, self-love, deep physical and spiritual nourishment, holistic health, open minds and joy. No matter your journey or

perspective.

I'm Laura of Radical Roots. I'm a certified CrossFit trainer, certified nutrition consultant, and Mama to Evie Wilder and Indie Bow.

I love outdoor adventure,

good food, especially sourdough [00:01:00] and

Katie Ferraro: mindful.

Jess Gaertner: And I'm Jess of Hold The Space Wellness. I'm a level one CrossFit trainer, a licensed and certified athletic trainer with a Masters in Kinesiology. And Mama to Bear and camille, I love food, trying new things, creating art, and being a perpetual learner.

Please note that while we're here to provide advice and insights, we aren't medical practitioners and always recommend that you check with a trusted provider before implementing any changes. Thanks for joining us. We're so happy you're here.

Laura Bruner: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Modern Mamas Podcast.

Thank you for being with us today. Apologies in advance for my little bit of a nasally voice as many of us have experienced this season, colds are rampant, but I did not want to miss an opportunity to interview the very wise, the very brilliant, the very informative Katie Ferraro. Who is joining us today?

Carrie is from baby led, the baby led weening team and has so much to share. So before I introduce you, Katie, and read your bio, I just wanna say hello and welcome and thank you for joining

Katie Ferraro: us. Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited.

Laura Bruner: Such a [00:02:00] treat. So Katie Ferraro, mph, H R D N and C V E, which you're gonna have to tell us what all of those stand for, is a registered dietician specializing in baby-led weening and the baby led weening team and a mom of seven.

She teaches nutrition at San Diego State University and hosts the top rated parenting podcast, baby led weening made easy. Katie runs the largest digital community dedicated to baby led weening, and she helps parents, caregivers, and healthcare providers give their a safe start to solid foods using baby lead weening.

I am excited about this. My daughter, my oldest is five and a half. My youngest is now almost 15 months, and we have primarily used, at least our version of baby lead weening approach. So I can't wait to pick your brain to hear more of what you have to share. To be honest, we just kind of went intuitively off of what felt good for us.

But I have a feeling that we're pretty closely aligned here, so. Before we dive any deeper, again, thank you for joining us and I do love to ask a fun icebreaker question. And as of right now, we are about six days away from the spring equinox, so changing [00:03:00] seasons here. So given that, what excites you about moving into Spring and this new season?

Katie Ferraro: Oh, an extra hour of daylight has been a godsend recently. My kids are all school age now and they're big into sports and baseball and like just having a little bit of time after dinner to go outside and play before bedtime is such a nice change from like, Eat dinner, go right to bed cuz it's dark. So I'm really excited about more daylight to be playing outside.

Laura Bruner: I love that so much. Our listeners know that I'm very, very much into and in tune with the transitions and like the seasonal shifts. And same here last night. And again, I have little ones, but we had dinner and then we were like, I thought it was like four 30, but it was actually, you know, very close to six.

And I was like, let's go for a walk. And it's one of my favorites is the after dinner walk. We just, we love, or the before dinner, but just getting outside in the evenings and where we live in the Pacific Northwest, this time of year, it's pretty much you can count on the nicest time of day is the evening.

So I love that we can now really embrace that. So [00:04:00] same boat here. Kindred souls. All right. So now I would love to hear a little bit more about you. So from your, from your own voice. Tell us about your story, how you got into this line of work, how you came to the place where you most specifically work in the baby-led weaning world.

Katie Ferraro: So I am a registered dietician and my specialty is in helping families transition their babies to solid food. So I work primarily with babies who are six to 12 months of age, and I always say it's like my favorite age group cuz having now bigger kids like babies do not talk back to you. I love that they eat everything you put out in front of them, but they're so excited and so interested in trying this whole new thing called solid food, right?

Because in the, in the first half of infancy, your baby doesn't have anything in their mouth except infant milk. So this is like a whole new world that's opening up to them. So I was a new mom about, Eight years ago and I did like a lot of moms, I just kind of listened to what my doctor said and with my oldest daughter, we really struggled with spoonfeeding.

So I'd love to hear more about your experience with your first, if you actually [00:05:00] did do baby-led weeding or if it was something you kind of fell into more with your second. Cuz we found that a lot of parents, they get more interested in this self-feeding approach with their second baby a lot of times cuz they tried spoon feeding with their first and they really struggled and they didn't like the idea of force feeding their child and now they have a picky eater, toddler or older kid.

I wanna find something that's more natural, that's more aligned with my baby's capabilities. And baby-led weening allows your baby to feed themselves those safe foods that you're offering as parents. But with my oldest, like I was totally lost. And I'm just curious, Laura, was that your experience as well?

Laura Bruner: You know, no. I'm fortunate in that. I delivered my daughter. My birth story is our fifth episode of this podcast, and so we, by the time I was even getting to Fir Foods, we had, I had talked, like met people through the podcast and we'd had some guests on and I just, I was in a very interesting place having a.

My first, after other friends have had babies and I just had a lot of different insight coming in. And my biggest thing was to follow my gut. And my gut said like, I'm gonna start feeding her when [00:06:00]she grabbed something off my plate. Cause I always just had her on my body in my lap. And from then on her first food was like a, a big piece of grassfed ribeye that she just took and like sucked all the juice out.

And I was like, oh, this makes sense. And I also just, to me it didn't make sense to like make a bunch of purees and stuff. We were eating such a real whole food diet. I was like, I feel like she should be eating, gets to be eating what we're eating, obviously with. Some parameters.

Katie Ferraro: So, but that makes, so it's funny cuz the kid have like, you know, very different experiences in the same boat.

Like, my friends have all had kids. Mm-hmm. I'm a dietician, like we ate fine, normal, regular food, but I just overthought the whole transition to solid foods and I was like, I have to make all the purees, I need to shove it down her mouth and make sure she eats it in like very quickly. With my oldest mealtimes just turned into this downright battleground.

And I remember telling my husband like, you know what, you can do this. Like, I have kept her alive for the first six months with breast milk. Like if this is what it's. Like from here on out. Like I am not interested because I remember feeling like such a failure as a mom with spoon feeding cuz [00:07:00]like what kind of parent can't feed their own child?

And like what kind of dietician mom at that? So at the height of our feeding frustration, my husband and I found out that I was pregnant with quadruplets, which we had been doing fertility. So we knew that the potential for multiples was out there, but I was never expecting to have. Four babies at once.

Laura Bruner: You can't see but I'm, I'm bowing down to you.

Katie Ferraro: Okay. No, I, and I, I would like the other moms to know, I mean, very carefully choose the words. I never say we found out we were pregnant with quadruplets. Like I was definitely carrying these four babies at once and like, it was stressful for both of us. But like physiologically, my body was experiencing the stress.

And then I remember thinking like when I saw that in the ultrasound, it was like, Gosh, how am I gonna feed four babies at once when I can't even feed the one baby that I have at home right now? So, fast forward, the quads were born at 34 weeks gestation. I gave birth to three boys and one girl, and they spent their first, you know, part of life in the NICU as, as premature babies do, growing and getting stronger.

And we were always there feeding the babies and. Friends would be there helping and saying like, you know, how's stuff going with [00:08:00] Molly at home? And I'm very honest. I remember telling a colleague who was also a dietician, you know, just kind of whining. I was whining about like, spoonfeeding, it's going so terrible and I hate it.

And my colleague said, well, why don't you try baby lead weening. And I had never heard of it. I was like, baby linguini, what are you talking about? She said, oh, it's this alternative to conventional spoon feeding, whereby the babies learn to feed themselves the age appropriate wholesome foods provided by their parents.

And I was like, whoa, that sounds awesome. And she's like, it helps cut down on picky eating. It helps, you know, honor their inborn abilities to feed themselves. And I was like, this all sounds wonderful, but also it sounds too good to be. But thankfully I had a lot of downtime in the NICU and I was, I'm also a college nutrition professor, so I had the opportunity to lean on some of my colleagues and I was like, is this baby little wean anything?

Like legit? Is there research on it? And I found out that there's a real incredible body of, of evidence and research that supports a baby's ability to self feed if we wait until they're really ready to start. So when the quads turned their six month adjusted age, and they were sitting on their own. We kind of went whole hog in on baby-led [00:09:00] weening.

And I, at the time, there was no resources on how to do baby-led weening. Lots of stuff about what it is and why it is an alternative to conventional spoon feeding and how that's more aligned with your baby's inborn ability to feed themselves. But nothing like, how do you actually do it? So I made a ton of mistakes throughout the course of.

Their weaning period. But what I realized was prior to the babies turning six months of age, they had eaten over a hundred foods. And if you look at traditionally spoonfed babies, they maybe have 10 or 15 foods before they turn one. And we know in the second year of life, most children experience picky eating.

And if you, how you have 10 or 15 foods and you lose those 10 or 15 foods to picky eating, that becomes a very challenging child to feed. But if you. A hundred foods your baby can eat and you lose 10 or 15 to pick at eating. It doesn't really matter, right? You still have like 85 or 90 foods your baby will eat.

So I kind of started getting this idea in my head like, wow, babies can eat so many more foods than we give them credit for. And another year later we, we ended up having a set of twins. So, In a period of three years, we had seven children. So had seven kids, [00:10:00] three and under for a while there. And with the twins, I also did baby-led weaning.

And I was like, you know, this whole experience was such a more positive foray into solid foods than I had had with my oldest. That I actually decided to switch the entire emphasis of my nutrition career and focus exclusively on baby-led weaning. And I took this idea of the hundred First Foods I created, the hundred first foods.

Back in 2016 and we've now helped tens of thousands of families give their babies a safe start to solid foods using baby lead weening and really helping them push their baby's palate to make and try over a hundred different foods before they turn one. Cuz this. Brief flavor window that opens up for your baby in infancy, where they'll like and accept a wide variety of foods.

We really, really wanna take advantage of that. And we've had just an absolute blast that's kind of become this global phenomenon around the world of families from all different sorts of food cultures, getting their babies to eat a hundred foods before turning one. And so now I exclusively teach this approach and help other healthcare providers learn how to do baby-led wean and help families have fun feeding their child so that they don't have to go through [00:11:00] the the torture and the pain.

You know, force feeding your child, which in turn, you know, we know to all the negative things that that leads to. We just kind of help parents skip that painful part of the transition and really help their babies develop a healthy relationship with food so they can end up, you know, enjoying the same family foods that the rest of the people in the family eat.

Yes. I love that so much. Two nights ago, I, I got some of the US wellness meats. It's like ground beef plus liver and heart and kidney and just, it's a, you know, ground beef combo. And I made this like pasta sauce and my littlest, my littlest as it's, it's very much resonating cuz my littlest is right now more adventurous than my five year old.

Which I imagine is pretty common that as they reach that, that like five year old, or maybe even sooner, like I feel like 3, 4, 5, she started to get a little bit pickier. But right now I feel like we're in this window where indie. She'll try anything I put in front of her and she surprises me sometimes with the things that she'll end up just like taking down that have a lot more seasoning than maybe my five year old is, is willing to take right now.

But even then, my five year old that she loves sardines and sauerkraut and like [00:12:00] liver worse and all that stuff that we introduced early and I'm just, I'm so grateful for that. I think the hardest part for me in, in this season is the. It's like the end of the day, you know, and we've had, and maybe you have something to speak to this, but you know, there she's feeding herself always and it can be messy.

So it's, it's been a good lesson for me in surrender, in surrendering to the mess, but the joy that we get sitting around the table. And it's not like I still get to sit and enjoy my meal. You know, I'm not just sitting there trying to,

and you're not short order cooking for three different, for four different people in your family.

Cause that's just not tenable or feasible. And I know with the mess it can. A barrier for some families, and I like that you use the word surrender. We sometimes tell parents like, you know, the goal here is not to eliminate the mess. Right? Learning how to eat is a full sensory experience. Mm-hmm. And touching the food and smashing it and smushing it and pushing it in your ear and your hair, that is actually part of the full sensory experience that is learning how to eat.

And so what we. Really try to stress with parents is that it's not the total amount of food that the baby eats that is important. We are not concerned at the beginning of starting solid foods. I don't [00:13:00]care how much your baby eats. What I'm interested in is your baby getting plenty of time to learn how to eat, and too often in our busy, fast paced life.

Especially as parents, we kind of wanna fast forward everything. I just wanna get to the point where she's eating a hundred foods. So we tell parents like, you know, your baby doesn't wake up on their first birthday and magically know how to eat a hundred foods. It's a long, slow, tedious, six month process, but you also need to feed this small person for the next 17 and a half years of their life.

So you might as well do the work. Now, let's see, early on. That flavor window opens and they will like and accept a wide variety of foods. You mentioned liver. It's, that's one of my favorite foods on our a hundred first foods list to watch babies pick up, you know, really high iron, nutrient rich, cool texture, a new food, a new flavor.

It's so, It's, there's so many things going on there besides just providing nutrition. And so if we can take a step back and look like, gosh, look at all the other stuff that's happening here, I think that also can help parents when they're kind of trying to manage the mess and not eliminate the mess, but we can do some things to minimize the mess.

And [00:14:00] so two tips I have for your listeners is, one is to use a splash mat underneath the highchair or the chair where your child eats. So you'll use like a large piece of cloth. I use a, a waterproof version. A splash mat and allowing, you know, the food will drop on the floor early on, and I'll generally pick the food up off the floor around three times and return it to the baby's plate or the bowl.

And in that way, you're not having to throw out that food that gets dropped on the floor as long as you're recycling it back up from the clean. Splash mat that's underneath the highchair. And the other one is even though it can be tempting to wanna wipe your baby down while they're eating, we do have to remember that that can be a really negative sensory experience for your baby.

Like how would you feel if you were trying to learn how to eat like oatmeal and this lady came at you and was like attacking you with her wet wipe or her washcloth? Like, we really want to allow babies to participate in that full sensory experience of learning how to eat. Wait until the end of the. To clean the baby up as hard as it may be, but like you said, sometimes you have to surrender to that mess knowing that this is for the greater good and allowing the child to become [00:15:00] independent in their ability to feed themselves also means taking care of the mess at the end of the meal and not in the middle of it.

Laura Bruner: I love that. Yeah. And we, I also have learned that just wiping her in general, she hates it. And I, I was, I was on your website and I was looking at some of the reviews of your work, and one gal said like this, it works like magic. My kid won't even like let. Try to offer food on a spoon anymore. And I love that.

I, I, along with the sensory and the learning and the nutrition component of it, there's also kind of this like empowering, you know, this idea of this, this little one who wants to do this thing themselves. I just think that's so cool.

Katie Ferraro: And they can, that's the other thing. Mm-hmm. I, I really admire the work of Jill Rapley, who is the founder of the baby-led weaning movement, and the co-author of the original baby-led weaning book had the good fortune to interview her numerous times throughout the years.

And one thing that she says that really sticks with me is, is through her research and experience and kind of creating this approach, which by the way, as a. Parenting philosophy and term baby led weening is not even 20 years old. But as a practice, of course, you know, for [00:16:00] millennia, parents have just modified the foods that they eat to make them safe for the babies to eat.

So this is not really anything new. Like what do you think? Cave mama fed cave baby before? There's a whole aisle full of pouches at Target, right? Like they just fed modified versions of the same foods we eat. But Jill Rap always says, It's, it's not that babies dislike the food, they dislike the feeding being done to them.

And if we think about, you know, breastfeeding and being responsive to our babies and responsive bottle feeding techniques, we, in the earlier part of infancy, we employ all of these responsive feeding tactics to learn to listen and respond to our baby's hungry cues. You know, why then at six months of age do we like strip all that autonomy away and grab a spoon of this like pureed, gk, and jam it down their throat?

That's completely misaligned with responsive feeding and baby-led Weaning is a responsive feeding method. It's just an extension of the responsive feeding techniques that you're employing when you're breastfeeding or responsively bottle feeding, letting the baby turn their head away when they're full, letting the [00:17:00] baby when they cry and they're telling you that they're hungry.

We can ascribe all of those same techniques to solid food feeding in the second half of infancy. It's just a matter of kind of making. The norm, right? Because I feel like we're moving in that direction. It feels so natural to let your baby feed themselves. It feels very unnatural to shove a spoon of pure food into a baby's mouth when they clearly don't want that to be done to them.

Laura Bruner: A hundred percent. I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. I'm not surprised that we're pretty aligned on this. So I'm excited to dive in more because some, some might be listening and be like, oh my gosh, I never even, this didn't occur to me. And others might be like, yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. And there's probably a whole spectrum in in between, which I love.

And that's why we come to this space and we share our journeys and we share our experiences. And I love that you came into this work because of your own struggles and that you were looking for a solution to your. Conflict with your first, you know, and then in the ways it impacted you. And I think that's the most important work we can do is when we find a solution to our own problems and then share that with anyone else who could benefit.

So thank you for [00:18:00] sharing and for doing what you do and for coming on our podcast and sharing more about your work. So, I mean, I, you've kind of, I mean, you have explained it, but if you, if someone, you were on an elevator, let's do the whole elevator pitch thing, and someone was like, Hey, what's baby led weaning?

What would be your during that elevator ride, explan.

Katie Ferraro: Well, funny you did ask. I have it all prepared in my head because people ask me like, what are you talking about baby-led weaning? First of all, I think I, I wish it had a better name. It's not a catchy name at all, but sometimes the parents are like, well, tell me more about this and what is baby-led weening?

And the way I describe it is, baby-led wean is simply an alternative to conventional or parent-led spoonfeeding whereby babies learn to feed themselves the age appropriate wholesome foods parents or caregivers provide to them. We wait until the baby is six months of. And showing the other reliable signs of readiness to eat.

So we don't feed babies at four and five months of age. We know that infant milk, breast milk, or formula sufficient to meet a baby's needs for the first six months of life. Just cuz you can shove a spoon of pure food down a baby's throat at four [00:19:00] months of age doesn't mean you should. And when the baby can sit up on their own, that's them demonstrating that they have the core strength to facilitate a safe swallow, and that's when they can start handling.

Beyond purees and beyond liquids and start experimenting with all of these different foods. And we know the greater the variety of foods and flavors and tastes and textures that you can expose your baby to early and often, the more likely they are to be an independent eater and the less likely they are to be a picky eater.

And we have parents tell us all the time that what they want for their children, more than anything, is for those children to develop a healthy relationship with food. And it begins from your baby's first bites. We don't have to feed. They can feed themselves. Boom. I love it.

Laura Bruner: I couldn't agree more. That's awesome.

Okay, lovely. So now that we have a general idea of what it is and how you came into this work, what are, and again you've touched on this, but if like, if again, elevator, someone's like, okay, what are the benefits? Why to maybe, maybe someone's overwhelmed by the idea they're scared and I'm sure we'll get into all of that as far as like the safety and all of that, but, or it just feels like the mess is gonna be too much or whatever.

[00:20:00] It's cause sometimes my husband, he'll be holding my littlest and like kind of just feeding her with a spoon as. Cooking or whatever. And I, he's a little bit more metaverse than I am, and so I could see that he's trying to kind of avoid that. So all that said, what are the benefits? Why do we want to, we've talked about empowerment, so if, again, what's the list?

What are the, what are the things that we're looking for here?

Katie Ferraro: So with baby-LED weaning, the focus is on allowing the baby to learn how to eat so much less emphasis and pressure on how much the baby is consuming. And the benefits of baby-led weaning include increased feeding, autonomy, and participation in family meals from the baby's first bites.

There's actually reduced risk of selective or what some people call picky eating later on in toddlerhood. And then there's actually a decreased risk of food allergies, and that's due to earlier exposure of potentially allergenic foods. We teach parents how to introduce all of the big nine allergenic foods.

So there's the nine foods that account for about 90% of food allergy in North America. And we can do that by introducing safe food-based versions of these foods early and [00:21:00] often. Reduce the risk of food allergy down the road as well. With this baby-led weaning approach, your baby is learning to recognize and respond to their inborn hunger and fullness cues, which in turn helps them become more self-paced, independent eaters that are listening to their body's cues, and at the end of the day, to developing a healthier relationship with food or a healthy foundation with food from their very first.

Love it.

Laura Bruner: Okay, cool. So let's get into some of the, what I imagine are some commonly asked questions and some questions that I know that I've had over the course of five and a half years of feeding babies. And it, I feel like this very much goes into toddlerhood and even Evie's age now at five and a half is kind of trying to follow some of these same concepts.

And maybe you can touch on that too. I did see you had a post kind of about like baby led meeting for the whole family. And so before we get into more of the questions, does this end, does baby leaning end or do you, is there a way that this kind of, this methodology transitions into toddlerhood and [00:22:00] then young child and et cetera from there?

I do think

Katie Ferraro: it starts with the family dynamic. There's so much data about the benefits of family meals and we could do, you know, entire podcast and there are dedicated to the benefits of trying to eat together with your family. And food can be such a pain point, especially for busy families and working families.

And we sometimes become so far, We sometimes become so disconnected from the actual foods that we're eating, that what we hear from parents sometimes is like, you know, I never really cared about the food that I prepared until I was responsible for this other person learning how to eat. And all of a sudden like, oh my gosh, I can't take them to drive through.

We, we, we can't have fast food for six month old babies. And so it's this notion of, of the entire family being able to eat together. Now, certainly at the very earlier part of weaning, we do not feed babies the same exact. That the family, it's like you don't just rip off a piece of your lasagna and give it to your six month old who's never had anything in their mouth except for infant milk.

So there, there is this transition period, but the ultimate goal being that by the time your baby turns, one, they can be getting most of their nutrition from food and that [00:23:00] they can be joining in and having modified versions of the same foods that the rest of the family is eating. So we're going this continuum from at six months of age, a hundred percent of your baby's nutrition is coming from infant milk.

And by 12 months of. Most of your baby's nutrition can be coming from solid foods, so we're kind of moving along that continuum in the six to 12 month mark. Doesn't happen overnight, but the ultimate goal there is the child is joining in and having meals with the family from their first bites.

Ultimately getting most of the nutrition from foods by the time they turn one, and hopefully beyond that, continuing to participate in family meals. I will say that in my experience, the two biggest saboteurs of the toddler diet, however, are. And snacks. Most toddlers have too much milk, cows milk. That is, and often.

The excessive amount of milk. What it does, it takes a very valuable room in that child's stomach. And if your child is not allowed to feel a term that I say, I call casual hunger. If we do not let children feel casual hunger, they're not hungry at mealtimes, guess what? They don't eat. And oftentimes that's a function of too [00:24:00] much milk or milk too close to meals a.

Combined with snacks. And so we know that snacks are pervasive in our society, but they really don't have to be like we teach parents. You know, you are the boss of your own kitchen and your own household, and you set the rules. And we very much advocate for snack free meal plans for infants. And toddlers as much as possible, acknowledging that the majority of the food comes from mealtime, however many meals a day it is that your family eats.

And small amounts of milk in between those meals can be the snack that tides the child over from meal to meal. Now, this works when you're on a schedule. Of course, if you change to your schedule, snacks become a very important part of the, the, the toddler's intake. However, oftentimes we go way overboard.

Toddlers are snacking all the time. And then the quality of the snacks that they're eating, of course, is not going to be as great as what you might be providing at mealtime. And if they're full of snacks and full of milk, there's no way your toddler or your school-age child is going to eat the wholesome meals that you're preparing.

So just I'm gonna look out there for, in toddlerhood [00:25:00] is the snack and the milk can really, really drive intake at mealtime. Yeah.

Laura Bruner: And what is it about kids and snacks? Snacks in our house are typically leftovers from the last meal that they didn't finish. So like when my, when my five and a half year old gets home from floor school goes like, pull out her lunchbox.

And if she, that's, that's what's available pretty much until they're, unless she's smashed in and she's clearly hungry and at that age, you know, they can communicate differently. But I have found with my littlest, and maybe you can speak to this, that she doesn't seem that interested in food. If I, if she wakes up from a nap and I've already had lunch and I'm just trying to get her some food cause I'm like, at spend, she, she like slept through lunch.

She's not interested unless typically, unless we're all eating, which I love personally, but she definitely seems to embrace the experience of us all sitting together and eating, and that's when she's the most interested.

Katie Ferraro: Isn't it wild how sub children who are just totally social children. We've worked, gosh, with so many Covid babies who some will, they've never been around other children.

And then this one baby that we were just working with recently, he would only eat when the other kids in the household were eating. He like it was just me and him not interested that I had. At all, just him and mom not [00:26:00] interested at all. The second the big kids came home from school and they had their afterschool snack and they're all sitting around the table, this baby would go to town.

And so sometimes it's just understanding the family dynamic and keeping in mind that you know, your baby has been watching you eat since even before your baby could eat. Like they, they get the hang of it. But the benefits of being able to eat together and enjoy those family meals is wonderful. But also on the other hand, like you don't have all day to be sitting around waiting for your child to tell you.

When they're hungry. When they're not hungry, right? You got stuff going on, you have a life to live. And so a helpful kind of mantra, I think for parents to remember is this modified version of what it's called, Ellen Saturn's, division of Responsibility in Feeding Theory. So Ellen Saturn is a registered dietician and a certified family therapist, and she has this division of responsibility and it basically says that when it comes to food, if you're ever feeling stressed about your role in food with your kids, remember this, that you have three jobs as the parent.

You are in charge of what the baby eats. You are in charge of where the baby eats and you are in charge of when the baby eats, but the baby is [00:27:00] ultimately in charge of how much or even weather they eat, right? So what the food is, you have to make safe foods that are hopefully wholesome. An age appropriate.

You do what? Okay. And when they eat, they eat. At mealtimes, we don't let children eat all day and graze all day long. There are set mealtimes and you do that as that's one of your jobs as a parent. And then where they eat. We highly recommend that babies are seated in a highchair with their feet resting flat.

On a solid foot plate, baby's feet resting flat on a solid foot plate, stabilizes the baby, and it helps facilitate a safe swallow. And you'll find that for bigger kids as well, getting those feet flat, even when they're doing homework or mealtime, it really, really helps them focus. So you the parent, you're in trouble charge of what and where and when the baby eats, but how much or even weather that child.

That's ultimately up to the child. And so whenever you feel like, oh, I'm just gonna, I need to finish their meal off with, I just need them to eat something. No, they need to decide whether or not they need to eat something and they will learn how to eat the food to help that feeling. [00:28:00] Called hunger go away.

They need a lot of time to figure that out and you've, you've noticed it with your own baby at 15 months of age. The rate of growth slows down as we progress through toddlerhood, they're still growing rapidly, but sometimes parents will say, oh my gosh, you know, my 12 month old eats less food Now when they.

Did when they were 10 months old. I said, of course they do, cuz the rate of growth has slowed down. And so some days they don't really need that much food and other days when they're more active they, or having a growth spurt, they might require more food. So you learn to anticipate these fluctuations, but how we respond to them is important and it's never to force feed a child.

All that does is cause aversions to food and feeding causes children to then require feeding therapy, which is very expensive and can be very extensive if we just stay in our lane and do our. Just let the child decide how much or even weather they eat. All of the many of the other problems associated with feeding disorders and feeding challenges kind of melt away.

Hello friends, Laura here popping in

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Laura Bruner: Modern Mamas. It's paleo valley.com/modern Mamas enjoy. Lovely. I was writing that down cause I really like that quote. Very cool. That clarifies a lot. And another question that I wanted to ask, I think the answer is pretty clear at this point, but I'd love to hear you [00:30:00] speak to it a little bit more.

Is, is there a, is it, is big LED winning a one size fits all approach? And I, I think I know the answer, but what would your response to

Katie Ferraro: that be? All children are different, in all families are different. I don't think that force feeding children by spoon should. The norm. My hope is that as we progress as a society and we learn more about the safety inherent baby-led weening, and that's a huge part of it, this emerging body of research that's supporting baby-led weening as a safe and viable alternative to conventional spoon feeding.

My hope is that force feeding by spoon, that will be the exception and it's would be totally normal when you're at a restaurant or out at a family event to see a seven or eight or nine month old baby picking up solid pieces of food even before they have their pins or grasp bringing it to their.

Munching off a little bit, even before they have teeth move it around their mouth, learning how to swallow it. Like that's how children learn how to eat. It's not shoving plastic pouches of colored applesauce down their throat. So my hope is that we're moving in a direction, which [00:31:00] is kind of ironic and we're just moving full circle, which is, you know, the, a advent commercial baby food is only been available as a construct since the earlier part of the 20th century.

Like it's a new idea that we buy. Baby junk food and shove it into a baby's mouth. Like if we could just get back to your baby's ability to be able to feed themselves these modified versions of the same foods the rest of the family is eating, it's actually much more aligned with it. It's, I always tell parents it saves you time.

If you're not short order cooking for multiple children, it saves you money. You don't have to buy. Some of these pouches are three or $4 per pouch, and families are doing three or four of them a day. They're not even close to nutrition and complete for their babies, so they're, they're spending a lot of.

On baby junk foods. So baby-led weaning saves you time, it saves you money. And I always say it saves you sanity. You're, you're making one meal to feed the whole family and you're teaching your child how to eat real foods. You don't have to buy fancy supplement programs to introduce your baby to allergenic foods.

You can make. Safe versions of those [00:32:00] allergenic foods and you use the food protein to help prevent food allergy. So I think it kind of makes a lot of sense, and especially in an era with kinda the contracting economy, we're seeing a real resurgence, especially in a lot of our content that's about just offering safe versions of Whole Foods because it saves you a lot of money at the end of the day.

There's lots of different reasons to do it. Um, and I would say, who does it not work for? We know that for some families that have babies that are exclusively tube fed, so if they rely on. Supplemental nutrition from either a feeding tube or if they're on IV nutrition, that this is not an approach that works for them.

But we've seen baby-led weenie work for families that have down syndrome for babies that have cleft lips and tongue ties, and babies that have many other, you know, feeding challenges. Sometimes their timeline looks a little bit different than a neurotypical child, but we believe that all babies deserve the right to learn how to feed themselves real food.

Laura Bruner: I agree. Love it. Okay. Very cool. Thank you for that. And I love that the answer. You know, there's just, there's clearly been so much thought put into this, and I think, I imagine so [00:33:00] much of that is because you've used this approach with your own babies and you know, if we're ever gonna put an intention in anything, I think it's the, the approaches that we take as mamas, so, I love it.

So I know we're, we're, we're going for a hundred foods here and now I'm like trying to take, I keep getting caught trying to make a mental list of how many foods Indie's tried, but

Katie Ferraro: Oh, don't worry. I'll get you my hundred first foods list indie, because I bet what parents really realize is, oh, I actually have tried a lot more than wheat.

Thought. Yeah. And when you have the list in front of you, it helps you so much. Cuz like, I don't want you to get stuck in the pasta, potatoes and rice rut for carbohydrate. Like there's so many, those foods are fine, but there's so many other, there are so many high fiber, whole grain, nutrient rich sources of carbohydrate that your child could be eating.

We, we don't have to refine. We don't have to rely on refined white carbs for carbohydrate for kids. A hundred

Laura Bruner: percent. And for us, even if we do, if I'm making oatmeal, I'll do like sprout oats, or I'll do, you know, soaked white rice. But then I'll cook the rice and bone broth. I'm always like, my brain always goes to like, how much nutrient nutrition can I get in this thing?

So like for her oatmeal, I'll add bone, [00:34:00] uh, bone broth, protein, and a bunch of butter and like all of that. And so I think about that way I'm like, Now the oatmeal is all of a sudden, like six foods and, and that kind of thing. So I can't wait to see the list. But if you could only choose three foods, your top three, let's say for starting your babe off, and then maybe this is a counter counter to, you know, everything that you've shared so far, but what are your top three to start?

Katie Ferraro: Oh my gosh, no one's ever asked me. This is a lot of pressure. I'll just tell you three of my favorite foods. They don't have mind that I love watching babies eat. Sardines. Yep. Liver and beets. And the reason why is I actively dislike all three of those foods, and yet I want my babies to like them. I guess I just don't want them to dislike certain foods.

And we hear that from so many parents, like I have food stuff. Be that. If you have. A history of an eating disorder or an active eating disorder, or you have severe picky eating. We get a lot of, my husband is picky and I don't want my baby to be picky. Whatever the case is, a lot of us don't wanna project weird food stuff onto our babies.

Mm-hmm. And when you put quote [00:35:00] unquote weird foods out there with unique different textures and different nutrient profiles and tastes, babies pick them up and eat them all. They don't discriminate and turn their nose up. My seven-year-old quad triple. Won't touch sardines to save their life. We actually just did a YouTube video with our five year old twins called five-year-old twins.

Taste tests are formerly favorite baby foods, and they tell me, oh, I don't like these. These aren't my favorite for all the foods that they used to smash when they were babies. And at the end of the day, they're slightly more selective than they were as they were babies, but they eat so many more foods than most children their age do, and I don't ever wanna say, oh, my kids are the best, but I don't wanna deal with severe picky eating.

And baby-led weaning doesn't prevent picky eating, but it really does help reduce the severity of it and that. What I'm here for is like, nobody's saying anything in one way is perfect versus the other. I just don't wanna have to make special meals for seven different kids. A hundred

Laura Bruner: percent. Oh my gosh.

Spot on there. And I just, I refuse to because we put a lot of effort into it. And also I just, there's, like you said, there's something about the mealtime and like sitting down and, and granted, I'm not, my, my kids don't eat every single thing I put in front of them. Evie is in a pickier [00:36:00] stage, but she'll try it.

It goes on her. And then we'll buffer with things like, I know that she'll always eat sauerkraut, so there's always a little bit of sauerkraut on her plate, and that's me making something different. That's pulling some sauerkraut out of a jar and plopping it on her plate, you know, that kind of thing. And then I also try and be intentional with like, okay, I, I do think about what my family likes, but it, it, it makes it, there's something very special about coming around the table and enjoying a meal together.

I think that's really played out and that my oldest, she, if we all, if it's dinnertime, she'll sit down. She won't take a bite until we're all sitting. And she's adamant about that. And I think it's really, really sweet and it's exactly what I grew up with for the most part. And I just, I feel like that's such an important part of like a family dynamic.

So,

Katie Ferraro: You have mentioned sauerkraut a number of times. Right? Which is so interesting because that is not usually like the fixer food that a lot of families would jump to. They'd be like, I'm just gonna give this kid a banana, which is totally fine. There's nothing wrong with fruit. We always tell parents it's not true when they hear things like, oh, if you introduce fruit before vegetables, that the child is gonna have [00:37:00] an infinity for sweet foods.

It doesn't work like that. However, sometimes parents will come and be like, Katie, my baby will only eat fruit and be like, Hey mom, if you're only offering fruit, the baby's only ever going to eat. So one of the reasons why we really stress utilizing this hundred first foods list is because we pick foods from five different categories.

One category is fruit. The next day we offer a new vegetable. The next day we offer a new starchy food. The next day we offer a new protein food. On the fifth day of each week, we always introduce an allergenic food. So in that way, each week we're introducing five new foods after a month. That's 20 new foods after five months.

That's a hundred foods before your baby turns one. And now you have this repertoire of a hundred different foods you can choose from. Because how hard is it at the end of the day? You are busy, you are tired, you are burned out. Oh, and now you have to feed these small people like we're just trying to help make parents' lives easier by tapping into the wide variety of foods that children really will eat if we put versions of them that are safe for them to eat out there and in front of their faces.

That was on mute.

Laura Bruner: Just have to offer it. Yeah, so we, we do a lot of fermented foods. I do a lot of sourdough sauerkraut, pickled things, and that's her [00:38:00] go-to vegetable that, and she loves baby carrots or carrots in general, but yeah, that's like our she'll always. She is, what's so interesting is they ebb and flow too.

I mean, I have this video of, of my oldest, my husband and I had eaten these like burger bowls. It was like arugula. Burger with cheese and a bunch of like, like a spicy sauerkraut and all that. And I had this video of her sitting on the table with his bowl just like drinking the last of the spicy juice that's outta the bottom.

And now like certain if I give her like a, some meat sticks, she's like, this is too spicy. And I know she'll come back, you know? And there was a time when she wouldn't touch a banana. And so what I've had to do is just really try and trust her to know, especially when it's like she'll go a week. And like not want any meat.

And I'm like, ah, strong food. Strong food, strong food is what we call it. But then a week later it's like all she wants. And so I feel like the baby led winning approach for me has really allowed for first my, myself, and then to help to foster what already exists in my daughter to trust her own. Cravings in her own body, signs and signals versus like pushing a [00:39:00] spoon in her mouth, making her eat something that her body's not asking for.

And so like at the end of the night last night, she's like, I want some, cuz we feed the little ones. Sometimes we'll just give her like a spoon full of butter if she wants it, and she'll take the spoon and feed herself the butter. And then my bigger one was like, I want butter. I want butter. And I was like, ask your body.

And she's like, I think I want butter. And I gave her, uh, some butter and she's like, I do not want butter. You know? So it's like helping her. It's amazing

Katie Ferraro: how they know, they know to listen, you know, listen to your own belly and you, you use different language for different age children and mm-hmm. They. As far as like the offering of the different seasonings and stuff, we always tell parents that, you know, babies do not need to eat bland food.

So we generally recommend avoiding added spam. We don't do any added sugars. And then anything that's super spicy that could be like really injurious to the baby, stay away from that. But everything else is on the table. And you know, think about how your baby's been exposed to flavor compounds like. Even from as early as pregnancy, right?

Via your amniotic fluid, the foods that you're eating, those flavor compounds travel through the amniotic fluid, the baby's introduced. That way when you're breastfeeding the different flavor compounds in the diet that you're consuming. Those transfer via breast milk like our babies [00:40:00]have. They're, they are.

Already exposed to these different flavor profiles. You don't have to just go super, super bland foods. And with the fermented foods, a lot of times, certain types of them tend to be very salty. So we generally don't do super salty foods for babies, but you can, there's lots of different fermented foods that don't have any added salt in them and are beneficial for babies as well.

And some parents, like, what are you talking about? Like babies can't have fermented foods. Like Yes, they certainly can. We just wanna make sure that there's not excessive sodium, any added sugar, or they're super spicy and could hurt the baby. But other than, You know, go for it. There's not a lot of foods that babies can't eat, and that's the thing that I'm really trying to bring to the baby-led weaning space is that for so long it's been this very, very judgmental corner of parenting and there's many different judgmental corners of parenting, but we're really trying to focus on the positive with all the foods that babies can eat.

Don't think of the things that they shouldn't be doing, but think about all the foods out there that your child can eat, and then essentially you, you want them to eat. It's just on the. To learn how to make those foods safe, obviously in order to look for choking risk, to help reduce the risk of food allergy down the road and to help, [00:41:00] you know, really build up this diet diversity cuz all the research is pointing towards the greater the diversity of the child's diet, the more independent eater they'll be and the less likely they will to be a selective or a picky eater.

So

Laura Bruner: cool. Awesome. Okay, so you've talked a lot about like safe and so I think, you know, I wanna make sure that we do have time to touch on that. What makes a. Safe for a baby? What, what steps? Because this is something I'd love to learn too, and I, I, again, I fond my gut with this, and I did, I did some research, like I, I know that my girls were both safe, but just some, like, if someone's feeling really overwhelmed or really stressed, what are some tidbits you can give on, on taking some first steps to make the food that maybe's on their plate safe for their baby?

Katie Ferraro: So when parents are thinking about starting this transition to solid foods, no matter what modality you choose for transitioning to solid foods, be that conventional spoon feeding or baby-led weaning, some people talk about trying to do a combination of both. And um, I do wanna point out that baby-led weaning does not mean skipping purees.

Purees are an important texture for your baby to master. They're just not the only texture babies can eat, and we can honor the self-feeding principles of baby-led [00:42:00] weening and still offer naturally, period. Like yogurt or unsweetened apple sauce or oatmeal. And we do that using what's called a pre-loaded spoon approach, whereby we load the spoon with the puree, put it in the baby's hand, and then the baby is the one who feeds themselves.

So it, it is a fallacy that baby-led weaning means skipping purees because it doesn't. But most of the starter foods that we start out with are actually finger foods, and that can be. Counterintuitive to parents. So like, wait, hold up. My baby's never had anything in their mouth except infant milk. And now you're telling me that they can have soft strips of avocado and they can do roasted parsnips and we can do, we do, um, soft shreddable pieces of lamb in the first week of baby-led weening.

We say yes, but the size that we offer is very important. So your early eater, six and seven, eight months of age, they don't have their pensa grasps, so they cannot pick up very small pieces of food. Parents sometimes are inclined to cut the food very small, thinking that it's making it safe wherein they're actually making it the exact size that could potentially include the baby's airway.

Bigger is better with baby-led weaning. We cut the soft strips of food about the size of your adult pinky [00:43:00] finger, and the baby then uses their whole hand or their Palmer grasp to rake and scoop the food. And into their mouth. And as long as the baby is the one driving the ED experience, they can munch to bite off a small piece of that.

They'll move it around their mouth. If it goes to the back for a little bit, they'll gag. That's great. Gagging is a good thing. Gagging is a natural, necessary part of learning how to eat. And we do a lot of education about the difference between gagging and choking. And of course parents are concerned about choking, but I like.

Teach parents that there's no higher risk of choking with the baby-led approach to starting solids compared to conventional spoon feeding, but only when the parents are educated about reducing choking risk. So we do a lot of teaching and education on how to make all the hundred foods on the hundred first foods list safe for babies to eat because there is so much misinformation out there about making first foods safe.

They need to be soft, they need to be longer. When it comes to meat, we never offer baby solid pieces of meat like steak or pork chops. It needs to be a soft, shreddable piece of meat. [00:44:00] So my mantra that I always teach is if you can shred the meat between your finger and your thumb, then it's safe for the baby to eat with their gums, with tons of resources on how to make meat safer.

Babies, if your family eats animal foods and if you don't eat animal foods, there are lots of wonderful. Iron plant foods that can be made safe for babies as well. So we have to look at the research that shows us, listen, this is a safe approach, but parents do need to be educated. We also always encourage the parents take a refresher infant CPR course before they start solid foods.

Right? You all took. In infant CPR before you had a baby, but that was like more than six months ago. And I don't know about you, but I can't remember like what I had for breakfast this morning, let alone the particulars of a CPR class I took six months ago. So I take refresher infant CPR every quarter, but I recommend that parents do it as well, just so that in the event of a choking incident, you know what to do with regards to cpr.

R CPR does save lives, but again, there's no higher risk of choking with baby-led weening than when compared to conventional spoon feeding. Perfect.

Laura Bruner: I love that we could probably do more purees in our life cuz our, maybe it's because it's from a pouch, but like Indi [00:45:00] used to eat out of a pouch. Now she's just wants, she just wants food she can hold or it's, and so I don't know if that is a part of it is because it's coming from a pouch,

Katie Ferraro: but, but I would argue that that's a good thing.

I mean, pouches. Completely disconnect the child from the food. Yeah, you can't see what the food looks like. You can't smell it. It doesn't taste like the real food. When you covered it in a bunch of applesauce. The foods in those pouches were packaged and processed and put in that pouch long before your child was even born.

And then you're paying three or $4 for it. There's no developmental milestone that says, our babies need to learn how to suck out of a pouch. And the plastic caps which contribute to environmental waste. I mean, there's, there's all sorts of drawbacks to pouches, but there are, there are, you know, think about all of the wonderful whole grains out there.

You can very easily and affordably make into a high fiber, high iron, plant-based, even higher protein. Natural whole grain cereal that costs you pennies of what some, you know, baby rice cereal would, would do. And even now, we, we are starting to really learn about the [00:46:00] drawbacks of regular offering of rice foods.

We do not recommend offering rice foods daily or regularly to babies because of the potential for arsenic toxicity. And you unfortunately, we'll still hear pediatricians saying things like start feeding with white rice cereal. That is such outdated and even now downright dangerous recommendations. And if your a family or your food culture consumes rice regularly, that's fine.

Continue to do so. We do have to acknowledge these higher rates of heavy metals, arsenic being one of them, present in rice foods, even if you're buying organic. Rice as a crop. Even organic rice preferentially takes up arsenic, which is a heavy metal, which has negative consequences for babies still developing brains.

So we don't offer those foods every day. We have to find other sources of carbohydrate. There's some great ones out there, and you easily make them into a cereal that you can offer off of a preloaded spoon, and you never have to buy a pouch in your life if you don't want to. I think they're great convenience foods.

Sometimes foods if you're traveling once in a while, but nowhere. Does it say that you have to feed your baby pouches? That's marketing at its finest. When [00:47:00] parents transition into the baby food aisle at Target and they go, I have to buy all this stuff. No you don't. Your baby can eat modified versions of the same foods the rest of the family eats.

It's easier, it's cheaper, it's saves you time, money, insanity. Yes.

Laura Bruner: Which I know we all need always. And I, I, again, I feel like I've said this multiple times, but I couldn't agree more. It's, it's been, it's made the whole process so much easier and so much more fun because now we get to, like, we all, and my oldest couldn't wait for Indy to start eating, you know, because it was so fun to, and ever since she was itty bitty.

One thing that we do too, and I don't know if this is a part of the process at all, but kind of intuitively is we do have family meals together, but. Before she could crawl, we would put, we had this like ask her and emla, which is kinda like a snuggle me organic type thing. And we'd put it on the table at every meal and, and my littlest was like such a tummy time baby.

So she would just like hang out on her. And as her neck got stronger, she would just watch us all eat. And so she, she started earlier than Evie because she couldn't, I mean, she was like begging for it. And she, it was amazing to watch the process. I think she like grabbed her first thing and like kind of just played with it [00:48:00] around four and a half, five months.

But I think again, it's, for us, it's just been such. An enjoyable experience to get to like, share. And I, our listeners know I love to cook, I love the kitchen, I love creating recipes. And so to have her as such a part of that, since so, so little has been, it's really been such a joy. I can't imagine like making all these meals, cooking for your

Katie Ferraro: baby is a fantastic way to get your older children involved.

And we hear from a lot of families love that their toddlers, preschool, and school aged children who. Really as interested in food, if you can involve them in picking the five foods each week that the baby's gonna be eating, following the instructions on how to make them safe, putting them out and encouraging the baby when they're eating it.

Like you're getting the, your older children involved in food preparation. And we know that children who are involved in the preparation of meals are much more inclined to actually eat those foods powerful.

Laura Bruner: Which is gonna impact them for the lifetime, because I think about all like my food issues from, you know, that I had to work through as a teenager into young adulthood and even still [00:49:00] sometimes, and I wonder how much of that could have been shifted if I had had more empowerment as a, a baby and a, a child to like choose the what and the when and the or the what and what the what and the how much and to feed.

And have that connection and to trust

Katie Ferraro: that your baby is just like, your baby's not going to choke themselves, your baby's not going to starve themselves. I love it. It's such a good point.

Laura Bruner: Fabulous. Okay, well I do, I have one more thought that I kind of wanted to touch on when it comes to safety too is, and this may, we will be brief cuz we are running low on time and I wanna make sure you have a chance to tell people where to find out more.

I know there is so much more for us to learn allergens. I know there's a lot. I get questions about that all the time. We recently had Cheryl Sue Hoy on the podcast. I believe I said that right. And she is the founder of Tiny Health and we talked a lot about like the gut microbiome and got into the real science around like baby's predisposition for allergens and whatnot.

But like on a more simplified basis, just coming at baby-led weening and coming at first foods. How do you work through allergens and allergenic?

Katie Ferraro: We encourage parents starting [00:50:00] in week one of baby-led weening to offer food-based versions of the big nine allergenic foods. So those are the nine foods that account for about 90% of food allergy.

And so there's no right or wrong allergenic food to start with, but you definitely do not need to buy expensive, fancy supplement programs to introduce your baby to food. As a dietician, I'd recommend a food first approach. So if you're not sure where to start, I think the three easiest allergenic foods to start with are cows.

Peanut and egg. Those are the three most common pediatric food allergies. But we've, we've started in week one with shellfish and fish and tree nut and soy sesame. Just to show parents, you just pick one of them, you introduce it on its own a number of times. We generally do our new allergenic food on.

Friday. So we'll do it twice on Saturday, twice on Sunday, by the end of the weekend. Your child's had six exposures to that, and once you're certain that they're not having an allergic reaction because the, the likelihood of your child having a full-blown anaphylactic reaction to a food is quite low, but then you move on to the next one, the next week.

The only thing we do is just not introduce two new allergenic foods at once. So [00:51:00] for example, we were just sharing an EDTA mommy hummus recipe yesterday. It had EDTA Mommy, which is. Soybean soy is one of the allergenic foods. And then in hummus there's tahini, which is sesame seed paste, and sesame is a different allergenic food.

We would wanna make sure that the baby's already been introduced to sesame on its own a number of times without reaction before we layered in the soy. Right? Because if you have two new allergenic foods that you're introducing at the same time the child has a reaction to one, how would you know which one it's from?

But this whole notion, parents said, well, Katie, you know, my doctor told me to wait three to five days between introducing foods and you're saying to do one or more new foods. Absolutely. You do not need to wait three to five days between introducing new foods. In fact, that unnecessarily slows your child's progress down and hold your baby back from achieving their potential with new foods.

And parents say, but what if they have an allergic reaction? That's why I gotta wait all these days in between foods. No you don't. The vast majority of allergic reactions, if your child is going to have an allergic reaction to a food, the vast majority will occur within minutes and up to no more than two hours following ingestion.

So it's not like [00:52:00] you offer your baby the edamame hummus, and then three days later the diaper's weird. You're like, oh my gosh, he must be allergic to tahini. It doesn't work like that. It's gonna be within minutes and up to no more than two hours. And so for on the hundred first foods list, we. The nine allergenic foods, but the other 91 foods on there are low risk foods.

You can easily introduce one per day or more than one per day. Your child is not going to have an allergic reaction to those foods, and you do not need to wait three to five days in between foods, and you certainly can make safe versions of each of these foods. We recommend doing one new food per week, and it's so amazing to see nine weeks into starting solid foods.

These families have knocked out all of the allergenic foods and their confidence just goes through the roof with their ability to really let their baby learn how to eat and for their baby to learn how to. Their needs with foods alone, not having to buy any pouches or any of these gimmicky supplement programs.

You can use food to teach your baby how to eat real foods, and that in turn helps reduce the risk of food allergy down the road.

Laura Bruner: Awesome. Yeah, we did a lot sooner with, with indie, again, with like the dairy, and we did raw dairy, and I [00:53:00] did fermented. You know, sourdough and that kind of stuff, but still peanut butter we did a little bit sooner and it just, I, it's nice.

I definitely, I will speak from experience of moving forward with more confidence now as when we go out to eat and I'm like, I'm not worried about her. Just like getting some of the sauce at, you know, I, I go, we go to this place and there's like a tahini sauce and I don't know about if there's like nuts in it or whatever, and I just, there's a relief that comes with trying that stuff early at home.

So then when you're out and about and we travel a ton and we eat a lot of cool foods and a lot of cool restaurants and so more peace of mind.

Katie Ferraro: And that's a great important point too, because parents are like, I just, I wanna be able to eat in a restaurant with my kid, and you don't have to bring special food to order special food.

They can just eat some of the same foods that you're eating and see money too. That's

Laura Bruner: how it should be. Like. We very rarely order off the kids' menu because it's like, yeah, because there's

Katie Ferraro: terrible foods

Laura Bruner: on the kids' menu. You should do a separate episode on that. Oh, that's a whole nother conversation.

So then final point on this would be just so Al and I think it's important to delineate between like an allergy and an intolerance because you, a parent might see. A week later or however long later, I don't know the actual science or the, the numbers [00:54:00] there, but like eczema pop up and maybe it's food related.

So is is there a difference there? And I guess what

Katie Ferraro: would you? Well, there is a link between eczema and food allergy risk. We know that there are two things that put a baby in the high risk category for peanut allergy. So your baby is considered to be at high risk for developing a peanut allergy if they already have an egg allergy and or severe eczema.

I'm not talking about the run of Themi eczema that all babies have. This is severe eczema. Been diagnosed as such, being followed by a pediatric dermatologist, an allergist, cuz you already have an egg allergy. That category right there, egg allergy and or severe eczema, that does put baby at high risk for peanut allergy.

And in that case, you certainly would want to consult with your pediatrician on the safest time and method for introducing peanut protein, but for all the other babies not in the high risk category. Introduce safe versions of that peanut allergy early and often and eczema we see there. There, there's a cool emerging, I mean, we don't know everything about food allergies.

It's part of the problem. There's a lot of gray area [00:55:00] here, but all signs, all research is pointing towards earlier introduction of these foods that there's absolutely no benefit to waiting. So if you think about like 20 years ago, I remember back when I was studying to be a dietician, the guidance was very different.

It was waiting until after the baby is. To introduce peanut, wait until after two to do fish. I mean, there's crazy guidelines based on absolutely no science. They just kind of made 'em up and said, well just wait. And that's how you prevent food allergy. And we know from research now that it's actually the opposite.

The earlier introduction helps prevent the food allergy. And now starting to explore a little bit more about the relationship between eczema. Very, very important. If your child does have eczema, that you're treating the eczema and. Is a link between eczema and food allergy. But no one is saying that if your child has a food allergy it's cuz you didn't treat the eczema.

But you know, we could do a whole separate episode on that link cuz that that's a very, very interesting area. But certainly do treat that eczema. And if the baby has severe eczema, then ask your pediatric provider about introduction of peanut allergy, cuz the guidelines are a little different there.

Laura Bruner: Awesome. Thank you for that. I love that, that clarification. Cause I know we get people just, I have to hop in

Katie Ferraro: two [00:56:00] minutes so I, I don't wanna rush you. Yeah, just

Laura Bruner: I'm do go to interview. Just, yeah, just wrapping. So at this point, where can people find you so much information that you shared here, and I know you have so much more.

I know you have a free guide. Would like share a little bit about that in these final minute? Sure. I

Katie Ferraro: love teaching families about starting solid food safely, and if you're feeling overwhelmed or you're interested in this idea of baby led weening, but you haven't really cracked the code on it yet, I teach a free one hour online video workshop called Baby Led Weening for Beginners.

I give everybody on that free workshop a copy of my hundred first foods list, so you'll never run out of ideas of foods your baby can eat, and you can sign up for this week's workshop times@fortifiedfam.com slash modern. So that's fortified f o. T I F I E D fam, f a m.com/modern. Get signed up for this week's workshops.

I do a big q and a at the end if you have any questions. And I'll also give you a copy of that hundred first foods list. I'd love to see all the new foods that your child is trying. If you guys are on Instagram, I'm at [00:57:00] baby-led Ween team and I just wanna say thank you for covering this topic cuz I think your.

Is, you know, I know your content, and they're really aligned with this idea of supporting a baby's ability to feed themselves. It just takes a little bit of education and you'll be well on your way to raising an independent eater, and

Laura Bruner: information is power. And I thank you for sharing yours with us and we'll link to all that in the show notes as well.

Katie, I know you gotta run, so thank you for being here. I appreciate your time, and thank you for all the work that you do.

Katie Ferraro: My pleasure. All right, take care. Thanks for tuning in. Can I help you? I hope you feel better, Lord, thank

Laura Bruner: you on the end. All right. Take care. Thanks everyone for tuning in and we'll chat next week.

I dunno what to say.

Thanks for listening to our podcast. See you next time. Thanks for listening to our podcast. See you next time. Bye. Hi.[00:58:00]