Nutrition

Eating Well

Nutrition for Baby

For the first 6 months of your baby’s life, breast milk or first infant formula will provide them with the energy and nutrients that they need. If you are breastfeeding, feeding only breast milk up to around 6 months will help protect your baby against illness and infections.  

After 6 months, your baby will be ready to experiment with solid food, which may include making solid foods into purees and baby rice added to milk. Once your baby is eating solids, it’s important to give them a nutritious diet, consisting of a variety of foods from the 4 main food groups:  

• Fruit and vegetables 
• Starchy carbohydrates 
• Dairy 
• Pulses, meat and other proteins  

Time to start weaning?

Introducing your baby to solid foods, also referred to as weaning or complementary feeding, starts when your baby is around 6 months old. 

Your baby should be introduced to a varied diet, alongside their usual breast milk or first infant formula. 

It can be confusing knowing when and how to start introducing solid foods.

Find out more on weaning from the NHS website.

Vitamins

It is important that toddlers have a highly nutritious diet. The government recommends all children aged 6 months to 5 years are given vitamin supplements containing vitamins A, C and D every day. As well as this, it is important that your child eats vegetables and fruit as they contain lots of vitamins, minerals and fibre. It is perfectly normal for toddlers and young children to be fussy eaters and refuse to try new foods, instead of worrying about what your child eats each day, consider what they eat each week as this will give you a good overview if they have a balanced diet.  

See the links below for more information about:  

• Easy ways to eat well and move more: https://www.nhs.uk/change4life  
• What to feed young children: What to feed young children - NHS (www.nhs.uk) 
• How to help fussy eaters: Fussy eaters - NHS (www.nhs.uk) 
• Allergies in babies and young children: Food allergies in babies and young children - NHS (www.nhs.uk) 
• Getting help to buy food and milk: Get help to buy food and milk (Healthy Start) 

TastED Sensory Food Education

Helping Children to Love New Foods (and Talk About Them Too). 

We are living through an unprecedented crisis in child health across the world, largely caused by the food that children eat. 

This crisis has many causes. Fresh vegetables and other nutritious foods can be expensive and many households do not have adequate cooking facilities. Meanwhile, we live in a world flooded with aggressively marketed sugary foods, whereas fresh home-made foods do not feature in ad campaigns. 

One of the reasons that children don’t tend to eat many vegetables is simply that they don’t like them. Many children do not enjoy vegetables and refuse to eat them even when they are available. 

Yet it’s perfectly possible for children to learn to love vegetables. 

This is where TastEd can help parents!! 

As every parent knows, it isn’t always easy to get children to enjoy vegetables. Over the years we’ve cajoled, we’ve offered reward charts, we’ve talked about 5-a-day – all to no avail. The average U.K. child eats just over one portion of vegetables a day. In many cases, the problem is that children just don’t know vegetables very well. It’s not unusual to meet British 11 year-olds who never tried a raw tomato or 8 year-olds who can’t recognise an onion when they see one. 

TastEd (which is short for Taste Education) wanted to offer parent and carers some free resources which we hope will be useful for families wanting to do a bit of food education at home during these strange times when a lot of us have had home schooling thrown upon us. They have created a series of super-simple activities that are an easy and fun way for you and your child to explore fruit and vegetables together using whatever ingredients you happen to have in your kitchen right now. 

The hope is that by the end of these sessions, your child will have used their natural curiosity and their five senses to develop a more positive relationship with food, especially vegetables. The sessions should also help them develop a new language for talking and writing about food. Our experience in U.K. classrooms has shown us that the TastEd approach can be a method for helping picky eaters try and enjoy new foods. Our methods are based on the tried and tested Sapere method which has been used in Finland, Sweden and elsewhere as a way to help children develop healthier eating habits. But every child is different and it may take longer for some children than others to learn new tastes. 

You can find more information on TastED here.

Food safety 

Food safety is important for all our Sefton children. As a parent or carer, you will do your utmost to prepare and handle food safely to ensure risk to your child/ran are minimised. 

Tragically, a child dies in the UK every month from choking and hundreds more require hospital treatment. It can happen quickly and it can happen to anyone. 

Babies and young children’s immune systems are not as strong and developed as adults’ which means they are more vulnerable to infections which can lead to food poisoning. It is important to take extra care with hygiene and preparing food safely. 

You can find information and guidance on the risks of chocking at Foundation Years, NHS and GOV.UK.