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We’ve all heard the recommendation. It’s standard. “Start your baby on a little bit of rice cereal.” Unfortunately, like ‘most everything else about mainstream doctors’ dietary recommendations, this isn’t actually based on anything except that it’s what all the doctors are recommending! So why is it a bad idea?
It has to do with enzymes. Every time we digest something, enzymes are hugely responsible for breaking that food down into its nutrient components. Different types of food require different enzymes. Starchy foods rely primarily on an enzyme called “amylase.”
Now, a small proportion of the amylase the body uses in the process of digesting something starchy – like rice or other grains, or like potatoes – is produced in the saliva. But the bulk of it is produced in the pancreas for use in the intestines. Here’s the thing: babies don’t produce the regular pancreatic amylase at birth.
They do produce some salivary amylase. But it takes a while for their bodies to start producing pancreatic amylase. Studies vary pretty widely in their estimates of how long. Some say that the enzyme levels reach adult-equivalent levels by about 6 months, but others are more in the 18 months range. That upper range seems to be more in line with what doctors used to believe & teach, before the modern era of commercial baby food took hold.
(I’m not including scientific references here, for two reasons. One, most of you don’t care; you want to know the basic concepts, but in plain language. Those of you who do care will go look it up. Two – and more significantly – there’s so little agreement among the studies with regard to details that it seems moot.)
Does that mean babies can’t digest rice at all?
Perhaps not. (I mean, perhaps it doesn’t mean that.) It seems probable that babies can digest very small amounts of rice cereal at around six months or so. “Tasting” sorts of amounts, like you’d give when you just want to introduce a baby to something new. But as a “first food” – especially when starting solids is encouraged by 6-7 months at the latest – we’re giving it to babies in quantities that seem considerably higher than what most of them can probably handle at that age.
Why can’t we tell? Or why is it not obvious that it’s a difficulty? I don’t really know, but I do have an educated guess. At least one of the studies which recently attempted to answer the question of whether babies can digest grains looked for a particular tell-tale sign of mal-digestion: diarrhea. When babies didn’t develop diarrhea, that was assumed to be a good sign. Which seems a safe assumption, but for the fact that it doesn’t match up with historical experience.
Back before all this mass-marketed stuff, doctors were reported diarrhea – regularly (no pun intended) – among wee ones given cereal grains. So what’s changed? We’re now giving iron-fortified cereal. And iron-fortified cereal has a reputation for causing constipation. I think it’s quite possible that the not-so-natural iron that being used to “fortify” the cereal is masking our babies’ difficulty with digesting it.
If we look at God’s design, we see that babies are equipped in the beginning to digest primarily fat, protein, and some simple sugars. That’s what milk is! We think of meat and fats as being “hard to digest” compared to grains, but our babies are born with the necessary enzymes for digesting protein and fat (which, incidentally, are rarely allergenic by comparison). But they are not born with the necessary enzymes for digesting grains. So grain is actually the hard-to-digest food!
A good rule of thumb, then, is to start with fats and proteins, and move on to increasingly complex carbohydrates – almost exactly the opposite order of what’s typically recommended today!
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Original article and pictures take titus2homemaker.com site
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