Figuring out what kinds of foods your baby likes to eat and which ones she absolutely can’t stand can be something of a challenge. It can take several tries before your baby knows whether or not she likes a particular food. In addition, there are some foods that babies seem to be prone to having allergic reactions to. For this reason, it’s important that you don’t try to feed certain foods to baby too early. Berries are one of those foods that you’ll want to wait a while for.
Generally speaking, you’ll want to wait until the age of six months or so before you introduce berries into your baby’s diet. When you do feed your baby berries, you’ll want to watch for signs of an allergic reaction. Eczema is one of the most common signs of an allergic reaction. If you see anything like this, you should talk with your baby’s doctor.
Berries aren’t necessarily a top allergenic food. In fact, they’re not even in the top eight of the most allergenic foods. It used to be that experts would recommend that you wait until after your baby’s first birthday to try berries, because some folks can be allergic. Today, however, that’s not the case.
One of the arguments against feeding your baby berries at an earlier age was because it was thought that delaying the introduction of a given food might help to prevent allergies to that food. Researchers now know that delaying does not seem to make a difference in that regard.
Even if your baby has a family history of food allergies, it should be all right to feed your baby berries after six months. Of course, if you have concerns in this area, you should most definitely check with your doctor first.
When you do introduce berries to your baby’s diet (or any other food, for that matter) you should try to wait two or three days afterwards before introducing a different new food. This will help you watch for allergic reaction symptoms, and will help to identify exactly which new food might be causing the reaction.