Katie Ferraro (3m 35s):
And we know that speech language pathologist and occupational therapists, they are infant feeding experts in the feeding therapy realm. But what about the typically developing infants? When those 50,000 babies who turn six months old every single day in the United States wake up and their parents and they're typically developing babies are like looking around, how do I start solid foods? And they have questions about baby Led Weaning, where are the Dietitians in the conversation? Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietician, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby led weaning here on the Baby Led Weaning Made Easy podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leading you with the competence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (4m 29s):
Today's episode is the litter bit different. I'm talking to the Dietitians, which in the last couple of weeks we've been doing a lot of projects specific to Dietitians. We do a baby Led Weaning day celebration every July 1st. This year we celebrated Dietitians, so we spent a lot of time like digging deep, especially into my email list. And I knew there were Dietitians deep in the email list. A lot of parents who follow and then they're like, oh, I'm also a dietician. And so I've been working on segmenting my list and we have a new offer for Dietitians. And this episode is speaking specifically to Dietitians because there's a lot of stuff we don't learn in school about starting solid foods. And if you have been working in the field of nutrition for a while, even though you are a dietician, when it comes time to start solid foods, if people ask you about baby Led Weaning or you even ask yourself like, what's the alternative to conventional adult-led spoonfeeding?

Katie Ferraro (5m 19s):
Most Dietitians will readily admit, wait, I don't really know that very much about babies feeding themselves from six months of age. Like maybe you can explain iron needs and yeah, sure, you can talk about growth and sure you can, you know, teach about complimentary foods from a nutrition standpoint. But when parents ask what's the difference between gagging and choking and how can I make meat safe? And how do you make all the allergenic foods for early eaters safe? What if my baby doesn't eat very much? What do we do if the pediatrician says they don't believe in baby Led Weaning? We're a family that can't afford special baby foods or fancy products. How do you deal with that? It suddenly becomes really clear that counseling for baby Led Weaning, you can't just tell families, oh, you just let the baby eat the same things the rest of the family eats.

Katie Ferraro (6m 3s):
That's not what baby Led Weaning is. It's actually a very specific clinical counseling skillset. And as a dietician, I know that most of us we're never formally taught it. I'm also a college nutrition professor. I've taught college nutrition for over 20 years, and I've actually written the component in the nutrition throughout the lifecycle book that teaches about baby Led Weaning. So I know for how many years, there wasn't even a mention of baby Led Weaning, but there's a real incredible body of evidence that supports baby Led Weaning as a safe and effective alternative to that conventional adult-led spoonfeeding. And so that's what I wanna talk about today, because if you are a dietician and you're listening to this, especially if you're a dietician who's also a mom, maybe you've taken time away from work or you're trying to figure out what your next career step looks like.

Katie Ferraro (6m 48s):
'cause Dietitians are in a lot of times the same boat as teachers. You have one baby, but if you have a second baby, a lot of times the cost of childcare barely covers what you are making, especially If you were working in a clinical nutrition position. It's just sad, right? You don't time to get in all the limitations of the system that we're living and working in, especially if you're in the United States, you might been looking at the infant feeding space and being like, wait a minute, I really like this. I love helping babies eat. I love watching my baby learn how to eat. I'm really drawn to this. I do know how to make food safe. I can figure this out. I want to do something like this and support families, but I don't know where to start.

Katie Ferraro (7m 29s):
And if any of that is resonating with you, then this episode is for you. I also do wanna invite you into something very specific. I mentioned the project that I've been working on this summer. Our summer 2026, founding members cohort for the baby Led Weaning certification course for Dietitians starts on July 20th. So our enrollment closes on July 17th. This is the project that I've been working on for a while now. We have a new certification and a new credential. So if you've noticed my credentials now include BLW. We just had a pilot group, the wheat completed earlier this year with a group of 20 Dietitians from around the world.

Katie Ferraro (8m 10s):
It was fascinating. We had Dietitians from Brazil and from Ireland and from Malaysia and from Turkey, United States and Canada, Germany as well. And we piloted this six week certification course for Dietitians, all about the evidence and the practical approach, food preparation, when to refer things that go wrong, how to counsel families, what you can do with this in your career. And now this program, this course is available to registered Dietitians to the public. So If you are a registered dietician, If you wanna become credentialed in baby Led Weaning, we'd love to have you as a member of this founding members cohort. We have a special discount code BLW day.

Katie Ferraro (8m 51s):
We've been celebrating Dietitians this whole month for baby Led Weaning day. The code BLW day works for 40% off enrollment. So that's for our very first public cohort. Use that code BLW day, it brings the enrollment down again pretty significantly to make this again, hopefully more doable for the dietician. Who's on the fence of like, is this something in the direction I want to go in my career? So I'll talk more about it at the end, but I just wanted to start with this bigger question. You know, why does a credentialing and certification program even need to exist? Because you're the expert in nutrition, right? A registered dietician is the expert in nutrition. We know feeding, we know growth charts, we know iron, we know allergy, we know child development, at least from the nutrition side, we know how to assess intake and how to talk about food.

Katie Ferraro (9m 37s):
But baby Led Weaning is where all of those topics collide with parent anxiety, social media, misinformation, actual safety concerns and developmental readiness. And historically, many Dietitians, most have been taught infant feeding through a very traditional lens, right? You start with spoon feeding, you progress through purees, you move to thicker textures, and then you eventually introduce finger foods. And I wanna be clear that that is still one way to start solid foods, but it's not the only evidence informed way because baby Led Weaning is a practical, safe hands-on approach to starting solid foods. And as you're likely aware, it's an alternative, an evidence-based alternative to conventional or adult-led spoonfeeding.

Katie Ferraro (10m 21s):
Baby Led Weaning is a responsive feeding approach. It promotes motor skill development, self-regulation of intake and diet diversity. And guess what? Families are already doing it. Did you know that 86% of families that Babylist surveyed said they plan to use baby Led Weaning when they start solid foods? And every day in the United States, 50,000 babies turn six months old and the vast majority of their parents have absolutely no idea how to safely start solid foods. So parents are saying they wanna do baby Led Weaning, and there's a bunch of 'em who have no clue how to do it. Okay? So parents are not gonna wait for Dietitians to catch up, right? They're gonna go to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook groups, apps, blogs, influencers, and some of what they find sure might be helpful, but a lot of what they find is gonna be terrifying.

Katie Ferraro (11m 6s):
And some of it's just gonna be downright wrong. And I don't say that to criticize parents. 'cause parents are doing exactly what we all do when we need help, they search. But if they search for baby Led Weaning, Dietitians should be a part of the answer, right? Dietitians deserve to be the credentialed experts at the infant feeding table. And that's really the emotional through line behind this whole program. Parents are already asking, social media is already answering. Dietitians deserve to be prepared. So when Jessica Cole, who's a registered dietician, her and I co-founded a separate nonprofit, the Commission on Baby Led Weaning certification.

Katie Ferraro (11m 46s):
We did it because there was no formal credentialing pathway designed specifically for Dietitians who want to specialize in baby Led Weaning. So Jessica is one of the first Dietitians worldwide who taught baby led weaning workshops back in the day. She founded the International Baby Led Weaning network of health professionals. She's been training and teaching in this space for years. And I've been teaching parents how to do baby Led Weaning for over a decade using my proprietary hundred First Foods approach. But even with all of that parent facing work, I kept coming back to this question like, where are the other Dietitians in this space? Because when I look at the infant feeding space, I see amazing occupational therapists. I see great speech language pathologists.

Katie Ferraro (12m 27s):
I see pediatricians doing the best they can with limited time in in visits. I see lactation professionals. I just myself finished training to become an IBCLC and I'm taking my exam later this year. There's a lot of people walking around calling themselves infant feeding experts that have absolutely no formal nutrition training. And I think feeding therapists do a wonderful job when things go wrong. And we teach very, very thoroughly about when you refer. But what about the vast majority of typically developing babies when it comes time for them to start solid foods? Dietitians should be leading the conversation about how to make those foods safe.

Hungry Root (13m 5s):
Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back. This episode is sponsored by Hungry Root. You know what's funny is I thought summer would make feeding my family easier because everybody's home more and maybe they would help out. Turns out it's the opposite. The kids are in and outta the house. Schedules are all over the place. We've been going to the beach a lot. A lot of camps, not as many as we did last year. I'm trying to take it easy. But somehow everyone's bigger. Now. They're hungry at different times all day long. But one thing that has stayed consistent so far for me this summer is Hungry Root. At this point, I don't really think of it as a meal kit. It's more like having someone else take grocery shopping and meal planning completely off of my plate. Hungry Root learns what my family likes, builds my grocery list order around that and keeps getting smarter every time I order. Lately, I've been discovering new products that end up becoming staples in our house. So they'll recommend a recipe that I would've never picked out on my own, or a healthy snack that my kids will all actually eat. And before I know it, it's automatically showing up in future orders because Hungry Root figured out what we liked. I love that I can still make changes whenever I want to, and I, I just don't have to start from scratch every week. So the quality is another reason that I've stuck with it. They screen out over 200 additives, like artificial sweeteners and preservatives, high fructose corn syrup. They carry brands that I already know and trust. Plus there are over 50,000 recipes and more than 1000 grocery items. So it never feels repetitive. And here's the kicker. So many of these meals already at about 15 minutes, you guys, honestly, the biggest payoff for me, it's not even the food. It's getting the time and the mental energy that I would normally spend figuring out what we're having for dinner and getting that back during the summer. That extra bandwidth is priceless. You are going to love Hungry Root as much as I do for a limited time. Get 40% off your first order, plus you get a free item in every box for life. This is such a good deal. Go to hungry root.com/weaning and use code weaning, that's hungry root.com/weaning code weaning to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life.

Katie Ferraro (15m 23s):
As much as we respect the work that pediatricians and family physicians do, you know, they do not have time nor the training to be talking about safe food preparation and readiness to eat and safe highchair positioning in the four or the six month. Well check, right? They got a lot of other things to do. There should be a group of Dietitians who are specialized in and trained in this evidence based approach. And so many Dietitians have told me over the years, I'm really, I wanna do what you do. I'm interested in baby Led Weaning, Katie, but I don't feel confident to counsel about it. Or I know the basics 'cause I did it with my own baby or two, but I don't know that I could explain it to other parents. Or I'm a dietician and a mom, but even I felt overwhelmed starting solid foods with babies.

Katie Ferraro (16m 3s):
Or I hear, I wanna work in this space, but I don't really know how to make it part of my career. 'cause who's gonna pay me to do that? So I wanna speak to that person for a minute because maybe you're home with your baby right now and you're wondering if you're gonna go back to work. Or maybe you're looking at your old job and thinking like, I don't know if I can go back to that schedule or that abysmal paycheck. Maybe you're working in clinical and you do love parts of it, but you also feel like you don't make enough money for the level of education and expertise the wheat all have, especially now with the master's requirement. So maybe you're doing general nutrition and you're tired of being a generalist, right? It's, I know personally, one of the reasons why I really wanted to niche down, especially in the later part of my career, was like I was tired of being 20 years.

Katie Ferraro (16m 45s):
I feel like I'd been a jack of all trades, master of none as a registered dietician. And maybe you're just thinking, I want Elaine, I want a specialty. I want something I can be known for. Maybe you've watched the work that I built in baby Led Weaning. I mean, you're listening to a podcast about baby Led Weaning for God's sake. So you are at least to some degree, interested in it. And you thought, I'd love to do something in that space. And that is not weird. And I want you to know that is definitely not threatening. That is not competition. A rising tide raises all ships. And as far as parenting trends in feeding Go, baby Led Weaning is riding a massive wave. Okay, I talked about those babies turning six months old every single day, more than 50,000 in the US every day.

Katie Ferraro (17m 26s):
And those are the parents who say, oh my gosh, I have to feed this baby real food and I have no idea what I'm doing. And those parents need help, right? Some of them will be in WIC and we wanna train all the WIC Dietitians too. 'cause half of all babies born in this country or in the WIC program, but some of them need one-on-one consults. Some of them need pediatric clinic handouts. Some of them need community-based supports. Some of them need culturally responsive guidance that fits their food traditions, their kitchen, their budget, their real life. Some need someone to explain why their baby gagged on avocado. And that doesn't mean they're choking. And you should, you know, skip right back to purees. We need someone who can say, yeah, you can do this safely and here's how. And that's where the Dietitians come in because baby Led Weaning counseling requires more than just enthusiasm for a baby's ability to feed themselves.

Katie Ferraro (18m 10s):
It requires a framework. It requires consistent language. It requires understanding, readiness, and not just age. It requires the wheat. Know that why being at that six month mark matters. Why sitting relatively unassisted matters. Why mouthing and bringing objects to the mouth matters and why that interest in food by itself is not enough. It requires that you know how to reduce choking risk And that you're not fear-mongering. You know the difference between gagging and choking And that you can explain that confidently to parents in a way that calms them down instead of ramping them up. Okay? You've got to know how to prepare food safely by age and stage and how to do those iron rich foods early and often. 'cause we don't need to rely on fortified, processed and packaged baby foods.

Katie Ferraro (18m 55s):
Okay? And these are things the wheat can learn. How to do the allergenic foods in safe age appropriate textures. And that is what we built into this program. The Wheat Teach. So the baby Led Weaning certification course for Dietitians, it's comprehensive. It's not a short webinar. I'm sorry, it's not a PDF download. It's not a list of foods your baby can eat. This is a six week certification and credentialing program designed to help Dietitians build a structured evidence based approach to counseling families on baby led weaning. Inside of the program, we cover what baby Led Weaning is, where it came from and what it's not. We're gonna look at the current research base and key safety considerations. We talk about a lot of those topics I mentioned. But infant growth development, the continued role of infant milk, responsive feeding, choking, risk reduction, food preparation, texture progression, allergen introduction, open cup drinking, common feeding challenges, special situations, adapted baby Led Weaning referral considerations, and how you integrate this into your professional practice.

Katie Ferraro (19m 56s):
And this is not just passive watching a videos, okay?

BLW Pro (19m 59s):
We've got interactive assignments. You're doing case-based activities, you're interacting with other nutrition professionals from around the world. There's a culminating project designed to help you apply what you're learning to real world counseling scenarios. And then at the end, eligible Dietitians complete a credentialing exam that's designed to demonstrate your proficiency in the evidence-based baby Led Weaning approach. So when you complete the course requirements and you pass the exam, you earn that BLW credential through the commission on baby Led Weaning certification. And that credential is designed to demonstrate that you've completed specialized training in baby Led Weaning. And I mentioned before we opened this enrollment publicly, we completed this certification program with an initial group of 20 Dietitians from around the world that gave us a ton of feedback. They helped us refine the curriculum, the assignments, the case studies. I'm also very proud that Jill Rapley, who is the pioneer of baby Led Weaning, the co-author of the original book, she's a senior advisor on this project. So Jessica and I spent time in the United Kingdom with her helping to formulate the curriculum. And while Jill Rapley is not herself a registered dietician, she's incredibly supportive of the work What Dietitians do. And she's aligned with the idea What Dietitians do need to have a more prominent role at the infant feeding table when it comes to baby Led Weaning. So we know through this experience of working with the first group of the pilot Dietitians who are now credentialed in baby Led Weaning of working with Jill Rapley to develop this curriculum for Dietitians. What Dietitians want structure, they want evidence, they want practical language they can use with their families. One of the Dietitians who already went through told us she loved the detailed videos or so many videos of baby eating. We show you exactly how to prepare food safely for the different ages and stages. Another dietician, who's already very well established in the pediatric world, took our program, got the credential. She told us that the allergy section really clarified for her what mild symptoms can look like, what severe symptoms can look like, and exactly how to respond. And then another dietician who's just kind of starting out, she said she has the confidence to try to make baby Led Weaning part of her business, something that she didn't have before. She started this. And then finally someone just wrote to me and said, I finally found my niche. I just booked my first baby Led Weaning class to teach. So that's exactly what we wanted this program to do. I don't wanna overwhelm you with more information. I know we're living in information overload times. We don't wanna leave you wondering how to translate research into practice. We want you to have a clear evidence-based framework for counseling families on readiness and safety, nutrition, allergens, texture regression, feeding challenges, and then knowing when to refer. And professionally, this can look a lot of different ways. 'cause we've got Dietitians who are in private practice, who wanna be in private practice, who are offering baby Led Weaning as part of their starting solids consults, as part of their breastfeeding practices, as part of their infant feeding packages, parent education classes, group programs, referral based services. So whether you work in wic, public health, community nutrition, if this is something that sounds up your alley, it can help you support families who are hearing about baby Led Weaning. And then they're gonna be really needing that practical guidance that fits their real life, their budget, their culture, and their kitchen. So if you're a dietician who's been thinking like, I wanna do something, the litter more specialized, but I'm not sure what it should be, baby led weaning, just maybe the lane you have been looking for. And our credential is not designed to make you start over. It's not designed to replace the expertise of course that you already have. Okay? It's designed to build on your existing nutrition training. I do wanna mention something about the investment. The full program price is $2,500 and I know $2,500 is a real investment. I never want to gloss over that. But because this is our first public cohort, we're offering a founding members pricing with that code BLW day that brings the enrollment down 40%. So it knocks a thousand dollars off. So the cost is $1,500. This is professional development, this is specialization, this is reusable counseling frameworks. You're getting its credibility and a credentialing pathway in a space where families are already seeking support. So if you're a dietician who wants to build a clear professional lane in baby led weaning, this is your opportunity to be part of the founding members cohort. The summer 2026 cohort begins July 20th, enrollment closes July 17th. You can use the code BW day at checkout for 40% off. Head to blwpro dot org. I'll link it up in the description. Wherever you're listening to or watching this again, blwpro dot org. Use code BW day. I would love to have you with us because families are already asking. You know this about baby Led Weaning. Babies are already starting solid foods. This way social media is already answering. And Dietitians deserve to be prepared to answer with confidence, clarity, and evidence-based guidance. So if you're ready to become one of the first Dietitians credentialed in baby Led Weaning, join us in the summer at 2026 founding members cohort. That code BLW day for 40% off will be good until enrollment closes on July 17th. We would love for you to be part of this new credentialing pathway and part of the next generation of Dietitians leading in baby Led Weaning. Thanks for listening, guys. I'll see you next time.

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