Many parents will ask you for help and advice about how to introduce solids to their child’s diet. Two-thirds of new mums have reported that they have received conflicting advice on what age to start (Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) 4th March 2022) so your advice needs to be clear, current and correct. You might also, in your various settings, have an influence over what your charges consume during the day, so you yourself need to be familiar with the latest advice for under-ones on what is considered good nutrition.
Conflicting advice
When I first qualified as a health visitor in the early 1980s, I was taught to recommend weaning at three months, changing to four months later in my career. Now the NHS advises weaning from six months, but a recent survey by the OHID found that 40% of first-time mums introduced solid food by the time their baby was five months. In the OHID survey, 28% of new mums report that their own mums had the biggest influence on their decision to start weaning, and as weaning advice has changed radically since the time today’s Granny was weaning her daughter or son, this may cause some confusion. No wonder current new mums report receiving conflicting advice.
Nevertheless, the current advice is based on evidence of health gains of an exclusive milk diet for around the first 26 weeks and has been consistent for a generation. Research has shown that the introduction of solid foods or infant formula before six months can reduce the amount of breastmilk consumed and is associated with greater risks of infectious illness in infants (UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative 2022).
Ovum question
Eggs, it seems, are one of the foods new parents are most confused about, not least because the advice has changed significantly in two major aspects since the mums you now speak to were babies.
- How to introduce them: Eggs can now be given runny or even raw to babies, as long as they have the British Lion mark on
- When to introduce them: Potentially allergenic foods like eggs now should be introduced early into a weaning diet to help protect against future allergy.
A third significant and current concern is the cost of preparing and cooking meals. A benefit to using eggs in the weaning diet is their relative cheapness in comparison to other high protein foods, and their ease to prepare, needing minimal fuel to cook. Families on a budget may think about switching to a cheaper cut of meat or bulking out meals with more root vegetables but often this requires longer cooking which, at today’s fuel prices, may outweigh any savings. Eggs, with a similar nutritional value to meat, require just minutes to cook.
In the early 1980s new parents were told to ditch the staple runny egg and soldiers, and only offer eggs well cooked, following the salmonella and eggs scare. However, in 2017 the Food Standards Agency confirmed that providing parents were using British Lion eggs- (all eggs sold in supermarkets carry this logo to indicate safety and quality), dippy eggs can return to the menu (FSA, 2017). This is so much easier for a first weaning food, combining both the more traditional way of feeding six-month-old, in a high-chair with a spoon and ‘baby led’ weaning, and when the baby can hold his/her own ‘soldier’ dripping in a highly nutritious runny egg yolk.
An even bigger shift in advice for Granny is the evidence around allergy (Gray 2019). When Granny was a new mum, she would have been advised to avoid any potential allergy-inducing foods as a first food, introducing foods such as nuts, eggs and shellfish nearer her child’s first birthday. Introducing these known potential allergy-inducing foods as part of the weaning diet now is thought to offer some protection against future allergy (Gray 2019).
The Food Standards Authority advises that foods like eggs can be introduced from around six months as part of your baby's diet, just like any other foods. Once introduced and if tolerated, these foods should become part of the baby's usual diet, to minimise the risk of allergy.
This is a huge hurdle to get over for some of the older generation, so nursery nurses/nursery workers are ideally placed to offer the correct advice.
Not shelling out
Finally, a very contempary issue for all families is the double whammy of both fuel and food poverty. We know more and more families, even families where both parents are in work and their children are in Early Years settings, are accessing food banks (The Trussell Trust 2021)
Eggs are a highly nutritious food that can make an important contribution to the diet of your charges as well as their families. Eggs provide them with high quality protein as well as many vitamins and minerals including folate, Vitamin D, iodine and long-chain omega-3 acids. Many of these vital nutrients are not so easily available in other foods, and alternative foods high in these can be much more expensive.
Bridget Halnan is a Senior Lecturer in Specialist Community Public Health Nursing at Anglia Ruskin University
References:
Gray, J., 2019. Egg consumption in pregnancy and infancy: advice has changed. Journal of Health Visiting, 7(2), pp.68-77.
https://www.food.gov.uk/news-updates/news/2017/16597/new-advice-on-eating-runny-eggs
https://www.firststepsnutrition.org/eating-well-infants-new-mums
https:// www.firststepsnutrition.org/eating-sustainably
https://www.nhs.uk/start4life/weaning/
https://www.unicef.org.uk/babyfriendly/about/benefits-of-breastfeeding/
