When Babies Can Eat Raw Food: You Should Know That

Basically, raw food is suitable for your baby. First pureed or grated and later cut into small pieces, you can serve soft fruit and vegetables. For the hard varieties, however, your offspring should already have molars.

Raw food is perfect for babies

During the first months of life, your baby only drinks milk and gets all the important nutrients from it. With the beginning of the sixth or seventh month of life, the time of solid food begins. From now on, your baby can also eat raw food.

• The sucking reflex gradually disappears and your baby learns to swallow the new food. This process can take a while and sometimes there is a bit of porridge next to it. This is completely normal.
• Start with pureed fruit or vegetable purees. Warm porridges are easier to digest for small stomachs.
• Apples and pears are particularly good raw vegetables. Finely pureed or grated, you can mix the raw fruit with the milk or cereal porridge, for example.
• If you have introduced a new type of fruit or vegetable, first wait and see how your baby’s digestion reacts.

Raw food brings variety

If your darling tolerates the new diet well, you can introduce other types of fruit and vegetables. Buy preferably little to untreated organic fruit and vegetables. This reduces exposure to harmful substances in baby food.

• All soft fruits and vegetables are ideal as raw complementary foods. You can offer bananas, kiwis, melon and soft peaches or nectarines as a pureed raw vegetable puree.
• As your baby gets older and teething, all you have to do is mash the soft fruit with a fork. Your darling can then easily crush the soft little pieces on the palate.
• From about a year, your child can eat and chew small pieces. Only the hard varieties such as kohlrabi or carrots should continue to be grated until the molars have broken through.
• Strawberries, bananas and the soft parts of courgettes and cucumbers are ideal snacks for in between and on the go.
• If you are still concerned that your baby could choke, use a fruit teat. These pacifier-like teats have a net in the front that you put the raw food in.