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Why Are We More Careful About Introducing Baby Food Than Giving Vaccines?

The rules about introducing baby food have changed a lot over the years.

Believe it or not, instead of rice cereal, when your baby is ready for solid foods, you can now give her fruits, veggies, meat, or even peanut butter. That’s right, infants can have peanut butter!

baby boy cake child
Let them eat cake, but don’t let that be your baby’s first food… Photo by Henley Design Studio on Pexels.com

In fact, if your baby has eczema, your pediatrician will likely encourage you to introduce peanut butter early, by four to six months, as a way to hopefully avoid peanut allergies later in life.

Why Are We More Careful About Introducing Baby Food Than Giving Vaccines?

Those are some big changes, aren’t they.

Still, a lot of other things stayed the same, including that parents should:

  • wait until at least four months, and often until six months, before they think about starting solid foods
  • only give one new food at a time

So while there are few restrictions on which foods to give now (still no honey before age 12 months and no choke foods), you still want to introduce one new food every three or four days to watch for a reaction.

Why is that different than for vaccines?

It’s because reactions to foods are more common, especially non-allergic type reactions (diarrhea, gas, and fussiness, etc), but also because there is basically no risk to delaying the introduction of new foods by this slow method.

There is also no real benefit to going much faster. Do you really want to introduce your baby to multiple new foods a day?

In addition to allergies and intolerances, there is another type of reaction you are watching for too – your baby simply not liking the food. For example, if one of your baby’s first foods is an apple, strawberry, beet combo puree and he spits it out at the first taste, how are you going to know which flavor he didn’t like? Isn’t it better to go through all of the single ingredient first foods before mixing them up?

Now if you did the same thing with vaccines, your baby would be getting a shot every four days! And it would leave them unprotected for a lot longer period of time.

Considering that serious vaccine reactions are rare, it is easy to understand that there is no benefit to only giving one vaccine at a time and we recommend that folks stick to the standard immunization schedule.

What to Know About Giving Vaccines and Introducing Baby Food

Although it is like comparing peas with peach mango and oatmeal cereal, stick to your pediatricians advice about vaccines and introducing baby food.

More on Giving Vaccines and Introducing Baby Food

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