by Erin Losie
There are two key things I take into consideration when deciding on baby girl’s next food, health benefits and digestibility.
I first one is pretty obvious. I want to feed my baby the best foods to produce the best health. The second one wasn’t something I’d considered until I started researching baby foods. For babies, milk is very easy to digest and is their only nutrient for the first several months of their life, so when solid food is introduced it takes some time for their little bodies to adjust and it’s only made harder if the food they are fed is difficult to digest. Side effects of difficult to digest foods are gas and constipation, neither of which makes for a fun day for Mom or Baby! Recognizing this, I wanted to give baby girl foods that were healthy and easily digestible.
Figuring out the digestibility of foods required some research, along with common sense. My first rule of thumb is, if I don’t eat a certain food because it hurts my stomach, the baby doesn’t eat it. Therefore no grains or soy for this baby! My second reference is the book, Super Nutrition for Babies by Dr. Katherine Erlich, M.D. and Kelly Genzliner, C.N.C, C.M.T.A. This book is a great resource and I’ve mentioned it before in Paleo Baby Foods! It provides some basic information on the digestion enzymes and how to make some healthy foods more digestible for the baby. Both of these things I’ve found very helpful.
Side note: I don’t agree with everything in this book. I use this book as a guide along with the other resources I mentioned in the Paleo Baby Foods! post. However, I’ve found the information on the topic of digestion to be easy to understand, science based, and consistent with my Paleo eating philosophy.
So with baby girl’s stomach already full of healthy beef stock and chicken stock, I moved on to banana. Banana is an easily digestible food due to the high enzyme content. At her next solid food feeding, I “buttered” her up with her favorite food of egg and then mashed a very ripe banana and 
fed it to her with a spoon. She chewed, skeptically and slowly, and then gave me the most disgusted look and spit it out! I tried again and she gave the same reaction. By the fourth try, she wouldn’t allow it in her mouth! A few days later I tried it again and she still didn’t like it. I tried to feed it to her on and off again for a few months, with no luck. Finally around seven months when I mixed it with yogurt she started to like it. Now it’s one of her favorite foods and she doesn’t even need the “mixer” of yogurt!
Since initially banana was a no-go, I moved on to avocado. Avocado is another great first baby food. 
Avocado is high in fat, like mother’s milk, and has great enzyme content, making it easily digestible. The day after the banana rejection, I mashed-up a ripe avocado and fed it to her with a spoon. She again chewed it very slowly and skeptically, but didn’t spit it out! After a few bits she decided she LOVED it! Avocado quickly became her second a favorite food behind egg.
Banana for the Baby
-1 very rip banana
-Mash-up very well, about ½ of it to start
-Feed to baby!
Avocado for the Baby
-1 very rip avocado
-Mash-up very well, about ¼ of it to start
-Feed to baby!