When it comes to suggesting diet for infants, we are pretty good at making sure breastfeeding is the meal of choice until around 6 months of age when complementary feeding is initiated. At that point, we may recommend cereals, vegetables and fruits be initiated, but we tend to dwell less and less on a recommended diet as our young patients enter toddlerhood assuming their diets are healthy ones resembling hopefully the healthy diets of parents. But as we also know, not every parent eats healthy—and food trends and preferences can also change over the years due to marketing strategies and what one can afford, when it comes to putting food on the table or into a toddler.
To look at what has been happening to the diets of US children in their first two years of life, Drs. Miles and Siega-Riz (10.1542/peds.2016-3290) reviewed cross-sectional data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for 0-23 month olds and looked for changes in their diets between 2005-2008 and then from 2009-2012, stratifying as well within sociodemographic groupings. The good news is with AAP nutrition guidelines that have come out over the time periods studied, there is less introduction of solids before five months of age than there used to be, but when it comes to adding vegetables into the diet, ¼ of 6-11 month olds and 1/5 of 12-23 month olds have no vegetables reported when parents were asked to recall their infant and toddler’s diet on designated recall days. Certain subpopulations were better than others at eating healthy or extending their breastfeeding activity. To find out what the trends are in infant and toddler healthy and not-so-healthy eating, feast on this study and learn more.
