If there's one thing you ought to know about me upfront, it's that I adore studying nutrition and in the past four years our family has tried almost every diet known to man. I'm telling you, we've done it all- vegetarian, vegan, candida cleanse (short term, no grains, no fruit, etc.), juicing fasts, raw food, wheat/gluten/dairy free (egg free is our latest- I seem to be sensitive, as does my 6 month old), and on and on, ad nauseam.
Our latest, and the one that I believe will stick as it has continually grabbed my attention and pulled me back to research and experiment more over the last two years, is the one found in Nourishing Traditions and The Maker's Diet. It is a diet based upon the dietary traditions of healthy people's and some primitive groups, all over the world. The research was done by Weston Price, whose foundation website has a wealth of knowledge on the subject of nutrition and health.
What does this have to do with feeding a baby? Everything, because the information found in these books flies in the face of conventional infant nutritional guidelines.
With my first child, I briefly started down the conventional road, against my instincts (because surely if all the books tell me to do this, it must be right!). I stopped almost as quickly as I had started, with only a brief week of rice cereal feedings at 4 and a half months. Instead, I waited until she was over 6 months (it was actually closer to 7 or 8, probably), and started her with nutrient-dense veggies, a few fruits, then gradually egg yolks and plain, organic yogurt, etc. By around 10 months she tried a few grains, such as kamut and millet and oats, and by a year was eating natural meats and legumes. We held off on cheese until after a year, as we did with wheat, and avoided cows milk altogether, going to goat's milk at around 15 months, although she was not weaned until 20 months.
Overall, I believe that her introduction to foods was acceptable, better than it could have been, and not particularly harmful. However, as I continue to study in this area, I now see things that I would change: I would have held off on all grains until after one year, and held off on wheat until age 2. I would have started her on meat earlier. I would have done everything in my power to search out raw milk (something I knew relatively little about at the time)
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