Organic Versus Regular Baby Food  

Being a mom is not easy.  When it comes to feeding your baby, there are enough choices to make your head spin.  Just one of which is the choice between organic and regular baby food.  Here are a few facts that will help making the decision easier for you. 

Babies are introduced to solid foods in stages.  The first stage is cereal.  Cereal is light and made with baby’s milk.  Because of their plain consistency, most cereals don’t pose the risk of food allergy that other foods do.   

When baby is ready to move past the cereal stage, there is strained baby food.  This can be found in the cute little jars on shelves in every grocery store.  The strained vegetables and fruits look like part of a geriatric diet, but remember babies have no teeth so they have no complaints. 

Next come baby foods with a thicker consistency.  The only way that I can tell the turkey from the chicken is by the label and sometimes the smell.  There again, baby doesn’t seem to mind, it’s something a little bit different and variety is good. 

The last stage is the chunky jarred foods.  These contain pieces of meat and vegetables that babies with some teeth can chew and swallow.  A child that is a year old or more can handle this pretty well. 

Now that we have the stages down pat, let’s go to organic foods.  Organic foods are farmed naturally with no pesticides or other chemicals used during farming.  Organic meats come from animals that have been farm raised on feed and without the use of antibiotics or steroids. 

What concerns the majority of parents about regular baby food is the processing of the ingredients that go into them.  In a perfect world, baby food would be all natural, but some processing has to be done to keep the product edible after several months on the store shelf.  Stores offer organic baby foods, but they are more expensive and still have gone through some processing to be included on the store shelves. 

Some parents are suspicious enough to resort to homemade baby foods using organic fruits and vegetables.  They get the peace of mind of knowing what is in their baby’s food and baby gets the natural taste of a whole host of fresh foods.  Others have decided that baby will be exposed to the possibility of pesticides during their childhood and probably sooner rather than later.   

They may buy organic jarred baby food or not.  If they don’t, they trust that the government guidelines for commercially grown food are being adhered to and that their baby’s food is safe.  The decision has to be made individually by the parents. 

The truth of the matter is the majority of foods are not organic.  Baby will encounter these foods at some point in their young life.  How safe or unsafe you believe baby’s food is or isn’t, is up to you and the research you have done to determine the right choice of regular or organic baby food for your baby. 

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