One of the things pediatricians talk about at well baby visits is nutrition. There are guidelines available that allow infants to grow in the healthiest manner.
None of those guidelines indicate that the faster an infant begins baby food, the better it is. It is not a race. Infants will be eating for the rest of their lives. Adding a few weeks or months at the beginning is not going to make much of a difference from that standpoint.
Recent studies still show that about 1 in 10 infants begin solid foods before four months of age.
However, it might make a difference in forming fat cells. It might help increase the risk for obesity.
The current recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is that breastfeeding only for the first six months of life is the best diet for any infant.
There are several reasons for that. One is related to iron. At birth newborns have high levels of red blood cells. They have iron in them. Over the first six to eight weeks of life the number of red blood cells drops significantly.
The infant stores the iron from those cells. It then uses it to make new blood cells as the body and number of blood cells in it continue to grow. Those extra iron stores are enough to last the infant until about five to six months of age.
Breast milk does not have much iron in it. Therefore, iron supplementation is needed. Once the child reaches six months and begins eating foods with iron in them, supplementation is less necessary.
As the infant grows the supply of breast milk will increase. That will occur if breast milk is the only thing the infant is drinking. However, if other foods are introduced, it is likely to cut down on the mother’s milk supply.
That then can lead to a cycle. The infant gets less breast milk so eats more food. The increased food intake lowers the production of breast milk further so more food needs to be eaten. And so on.
Some infants do not breast feed and take infant formula. There is logic to when to introduce supplemental food in those circumstances as well.
Formula contains 20 calories per ounce of milk. Infants need about 100 calories per kilogram in order to grow. One quart of milk contains 640 calories (32 ounces times 20 calories per ounce). Therefore, there are enough calories in one quart of formula to last until a child weighs 6.4 kilograms (100 calories per kilogram).
A child who weights 6.4 kilograms weighs about 14.5 pounds. That means that when a child reaches 14.5 pounds, one of two things must happen. Either they need to drink more milk or have their calories supplemented by another manner. More than a quart a day might be too much.
The average newborn weighs about 3.3 kilograms. They double that birth weight in about 5-6 months. Therefore, they do not need anything more than a quart of milk until that point. The exception to that particular rule is the child who weighs over 10 pounds at birth. They will reach 14.5 pounds much sooner than the average child.
For those of you that like trivia the heaviest infant ever born weighed 22 pounds 8 ounces and was born in Aversa, Italy in 1955. The heaviest infant I have ever personally seen was 15 pounds 2 ounces. I was present at a delivery of twins who weighed 9 pounds 14 ounces and 10 pounds 2 ounces (20 pounds worth of baby).
The bottom line is that the recommendation of the AAP is not just based on a number picked at random. It was logical and suggested that waiting a few more months to begin solid foods makes sense at multiple levels.