It’s important to remember that a toddler’s diet differs greatly from that an adult person’s one, so there should be certain foods to avoid in it. Your child’s future state of health greatly depends on the products that make up his diet while he is a toddler. In this case pediatricians’ recommendations can be of great help. Apart from food products that can be harmful to kids of any age.
Foods that should never be a part of your child’s diet if he’s younger than 3
1. All kinds of sausage, except for those especially approved for infants (semi-smoked and smoked sausages are a big no-no until your kid is old enough to go to school).
2. Millet grain, except for that specially processed for toddlers’ meals.
3. Industrially produced curd cheese desserts and milk shakes (all kinds of factory made sweet dairy products).
4. Seafood such as shrimps, mussels or crab meat (they are very allergenic).
5. Chocolate and chocolate candy, any kinds of chocolate-glazed sweets, buns and muffins, cookies.
6. Cakes of cream pasties.
7. Ice-cream (high concentration of fats, sugar, unwholesome additives that can cause allergic reactions).
8. Soda drinks (cause heavy gastrointestinal tract irritation).
9. Mutton, fatty pork meat, waterfowl (goose and duck) meat (very rich with high-melting fats).
10. Pickled cucumbers and tomatoes (till the age of 2).
What kind of food products should be banished from your kid’s menu even after the age of 3?
1. Mushrooms of any kind.
2. Fatty meats and fish.
3. Goose and duck meat and eggs.
4. Canned foods.
5. Hot spicy sauces, mustard, horseradish sauce, pepper, vinegar, natural coffee, reconstituted juices and drinks, mayonnaise.
6. Meat pastes and liver sausages.
7. Freeze-dried meals.
8. Fish or meat in aspic.
9. Any products containing food additives (synthetic flavorants or colorants). These are bubble-gum and potato chips.
10. Red or black caviar (extremely allergenic and contains preservatives and excessive amount of salt which is bad for kidneys).
11. Soda drinks; sweetened drinks with synthetic flavorants and/or colorants.
Some foods should be avoided at any age. These include raw milk or non-pasteurized sour cream and curd cheese, fish that was not heat-treated (i.e. sushi or stockfish) and cold-smoked fish.
Salt or no salt?
Your kid’s body will not do very well without any salt at all but its need in salt is not very big, while the excess of it can be quite harmful.
Salt supplies our bodies with two elements: sodium and chlorine. The former is especially important because it supports water exchange in our bodies and is included in all of its fluids: blood, gastric juice and others. Without sodium your muscle cells or vascular cells can’t work; it’s what helps keeping your arterial pressure at normal level. Our body can adjust the level of sodium to its needs: if it lacks sault, it “tells” you that you should eat something salty, while if sodium level is too high, it will “tell” you to drink more water, to remove any excess of sodium.
When it comes to modern infants, the issue of high sodium level occurs more often than the issue of its lack, because the only way a toddler can remove excess of sodium from his body is by sweating or vomiting or diarrhea. At the same time, scientific studies confirm that we use too much salt with our food. When this habit becomes a tradition, it can, in the long run, cause metabolism, kidney, heart and vascular issues. Besides, it is quite hard for an infant’s body to sustain the right balance of minerals, as well as to keep them at a normal level.
Of course, you will have to consider your child’s preferences but don’t give up at once. If your kid refuses to eat some type of food, try to offer it to him again and again, experiment with ways of cooking it, make the meals look prettier, add some mild spice.
Your task is to teach your infant to eat moderately salted food. For this, you have to follow some simple rules.
– Remember that nearly all food products your little one tastes during the first years of his life contain sodium: dairy products that constitute the bigger part of a kid’s diet, meat and grain products — they all have much of sodium in them. Besides, breastfed babies don’t need much of it. This is why there’s no necessity in salting food for kids under 12 months old. There’s a good reason why infant food products either don’t contain salt at all or contain very small amounts of it.
– When your kid gets older add just a little bit salt to his food; it should be a little undersalted to your taste.
– It’s better to add salt to food in the end of a cooking process, when sodium in the source products gets transferred to the meal you cook.
– Add small portions of salt in several stages.
– Make sure that all kind of products with high salt content, such as fish, sausages, and some sorts of cheese are introduced into your kid’s menu only after he reaches the age of 3.