Feeding fundamentals

Top tips and nutritional advice to help your baby thrive

Welcoming a new baby brings countless questions, especially around feeding and nutrition. In those early months and years, good nutrition plays a vital role in supporting healthy growth, brain development, and immunity. Whether you’re breastfeeding, formula feeding, or starting solids, understanding your baby’s nutritional needs can feel overwhelming. Here, Sian Eustace, owner–manager of Healing Harvest in Main St, Kinvara, Co Galway, provides some tips to help parents navigate each stage with confidence.

Laying the foundations
Infant nutrition actually begins long before birth, and many would say even before conception. Ideally, both parents would consider their own diet, and its potential effects on the future foetus, in the months before beginning the attempt to conceive. These changes could include things such as removing alcohol, tobacco and other potentially harmful substances from the diet, reducing or removing such things as refined sugar and caffeine, and eating a diet rich in wholefoods, and low in processed foods. Of course, this ideal is not always possible, and making efforts to improve diet at any stage will be beneficial for all the family.

Breast is best
Once baby arrives in the world, the best food for the first six months and beyond is breastmilk. And, ideally, baby would be exclusively breastfed for this initial period. In Ireland, we have not always had the highest rates of breastfeeding and, as a breastfeeding support counsellor myself, people often mention lack of support at early stages post-partum as the reason that they were unable to breastfeed.

There are many groups nowadays, such as Cuidiú, La Leche League, and Friends of Breastfeeding, who provide breastfeeding support in the community. If you are pregnant and planning to breastfeed, it can be useful to link in with your local group before the baby is born so that you have connections and contacts should you need them in the post-partum period. If the baby is being bottle-fed, formula is designed to contain the protein, vitamins, and minerals that the baby will require for the first six months of life.

First foods
Beyond the first six months, babies need to continue to consume breastmilk or another formula milk of choice. The WHO recommends breastfeeding to age two and beyond. This will continue to be their primary source of nutrition, providing protein, calcium and other nutrients. Babies also need iron, vitamins C and D and omega-3 fatty acids and these can begin to come from foods. It is best to keep foods to whole food choices such as fresh vegetables and fruits, protein sources such as fish, meat or combinations of vegetarian or vegan sources of protein, such as pulses and wholegrains.

Supplement suggestions
In Ireland, vitamin D is recommended for breastfed babies for the first year of life. If formula-fed, this extra vitamin D has already been added to the milk. If supplementing with vitamin D, look for a product that contains just the vitamin D3 and the oil in which it is carried (often coconut oil). There are many such products on the market from which to choose.

If your baby was born by C-section, there is some argument for providing an infant probiotic and research is ongoing into this area. When babies are born vaginally, they are exposed to their mother’s bacteria, which starts the process of developing baby’s own gut microbiome. This is lacking in babies born by C-section. There are a number of infant probiotics on the market and your local independent health store can advise you on how to administer these, depending on whether baby is breast or bottle-fed.