Avocado Day: How to Safely Feed Avocados for Baby-Led Weaning

Katie Ferraro (0s):

So avocados are not only packed with nutrition containing over 20 vitamins and minerals, but they also have fat, which is important for your baby's brain growth. They're an ideal texture for starting solid foods are so versatile, but we do have to be safe when we're starting babies out on avocados. And here's a few ways to do that. Hey, there I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietitian college nutrition professor and mama 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, leaving you with the competence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (42s):

Well, hello. Hello, and welcome To a special bonus episode of the baby led weaning made easy podcast today. We're celebrating national avocado day. And so this episode is all about how to safely feed avocados for baby led weaning. Now it's no surprise if you've done any research about baby led weaning that avocados are like a fan favorite when it comes to first foods for babies. And we're going to dive into exactly why that is in a moment, but one of the reasons why I like avocados as a first food for baby led weaning is because you can offer them safely three different ways on the very first day of baby led weaning. So I teach a purees for a few days, approach to baby led weaning, and this really helps some parents get over their fear of doing, you know, you're taking your baby right from a pure liquid diet.

Katie Ferraro (1m 30s):

We're talking about breast milk and or formula only for the first six months of life. And sometimes parents have a lot of anxiety going directly into soft, solid strips of foods like avocado slices on day one. So you can do this periods for a few days approach. You can offer a thin puree of avocado on a preloaded baby led weaning spoon, and then you can progress to a chunkier puree of mashed avocados also offered from a preloaded spoon, and then you can even move on to soft, solid strips of avocado slices that your baby self feeds, and you can do all of this on day. One of baby led weaning in one single 15 minute self-feeding session. You can definitely skip the puree part on the preloaded spoon if you want to. But again, this purees for a few days approach does help.

Katie Ferraro (2m 13s):

Some parents who are particularly anxious about diving right into solid food on day one. So I do teach more about this purees for a few days approach to starting solid foods in my free online workshop. It's called baby led weaning for beginners. This is a workshop. That's all about how to get your baby to try 100 foods before turning one, without you having to spoonfeed purees or buy pouches. So everyone on this free workshop gets a copy of my hundred first foods list. So you'll never worry about what foods to feed your baby after those simple starter foods like avocado. So you can sign up for this week's free workshop times. If you go to baby led, weaning dot C O again, that's baby led, weaning dot C O and hope to see you there.

Katie Ferraro (2m 53s):

Now let's take a closer look at that very famous first food for baby led weaning avocados. Now I have a very special place in my heart for avocados. So I'm a registered dietician. And my background is in nutrition, communications and media. I'm from San Diego and I've lived in California. Most of my adult life, most of my whole life, actually part of my adult life, I was gone, but back and long before I had children, I was a national spokesperson for the California avocado commission. So I spent a lot of time with the California avocado commission as part of my job, learning about avocados, teaching about avocados, all about how they're grown and harvested, obviously all of the nutrition benefits. And then of course teaching about how to utilize them in healthy meal planning throughout the lifespan.

Katie Ferraro (3m 34s):

So like from birth to death, basically. So my job was to promote the benefits of California avocados at that time. So during this period, when I was a national spokesperson for the California avocado commission, I eventually was pregnant with my oldest child is a Singleton. And then I went on to become pregnant within half quadruplets. And then I had twins. All of this was when I was working with the California avocado commission and we actually did baby led weaning for six of our seven kids. And I had seven kids in under three years. So we were like back-to-back-to-back baby feeding all the time. And I really came to appreciate avocados, not just for their nutrition benefits, which are many, and we'll get to, but really also for their application as an ideal first food, regardless of whether you're doing traditional spoonfeeding or baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (4m 18s):

So I actually remember doing avocado demonstrations when I was nine months pregnant with my first baby. We were at a Grove tour of it. I did a lot of work. Then after that, talking about avocados for babies, I wrote a really thorough piece for the California avocado commission, all about the benefits of avocados as a first food. And I'll go ahead and link to that article on the show notes for this episode, if you go to BLW podcast.com, all right. So what's the big deal about avocados for baby led weaning. And I want to start this episode out by pointing out that you do not have to do avocados as your baby's first food. You do what works for you, right? Some people don't have access to avocados or they can't stay on the side or the smell of them, or maybe they haven't, but they're not ripe. Or maybe there's another food you prefer to start with.

Katie Ferraro (4m 60s):

And that's fine if just that, if you're looking for a suggestion and you don't have any particular preference for another food to start with, I love avocados to do on day one of baby led weaning, because I think they're so easy for babies to succeed with. And it helps give parents that little boost of confidence that they need to ensure. Gosh, you know, my baby really can do this because it's not really until you do it with your own baby, that you believe that baby led weaning will work. So let's talk about ripening. I mentioned sometimes the avocado not being right. It can be a barrier to using that as a first food. Here's a pro tip from my CAC days, you can expedite the ripening process of avocados by placing them in a brown paper bag with a ripe banana.

Katie Ferraro (5m 41s):

So the ripening process of the banana, it puts out ethylene gas, which in turn also expedites the ripening of the avocado. You can honestly do it with any fruit, but bananas tend to ripen more quickly. So another totally not supported avocado ripening method that I've figured out is if you just forget your groceries and leave them in a hot car for a day or two, that will definitely do the job again. It's not like an endorse method, but I've done it on accident. And it's a quick way to get your avocados right now. How do you know if an avocado is ready when you're selecting an avocado? Like, is this one good to go? So the vast majority of the avocados that we eat in north America are the Haas variety. So Haas avocados turn darker, the more ripe they get. So they go from being like a bright green when they're not ripe to an almost like dark olive green.

Katie Ferraro (6m 24s):

Sometimes it's close to even black color alone is not an indicator of readiness though. So you also want to feel your avocados. They should eat cold a little when you press them, especially around the neck. So basically if they're not rock hard, they will yield a little bit. And that's an indicator that they're probably close to. Ready? How do you cut an avocado or what's the safest way to cut an avocado contrary to popular belief in what you see on cooking shows all the time. You don't want to just slice the avocado in half and then hack the pit out with your knife. I have seen so many people got their hands doing this. I personally cut my hands doing this before I knew the safer way to cut an avocado. So the way we always demoed avocado cutting. When I was with CAC, it's much safer. You cut the avocado in half lengthwise around the pit, and then you rotate the avocado 90 degrees, and you do another lengthwise cut around the pit.

Katie Ferraro (7m 13s):

So essentially you have split the avocado into four equal pieces. You peel them off of the pit, and then you gently peel away the skin from the top of the neck, part of the avocado and wallah, you have perfectly safely sliced avocado pieces. And how do you serve avocado to your baby? I mentioned at the top of the episode, my purees for a few days approach, and you can definitely honor the self feeding principles of baby led weaning and still utilize purees. If you employ what we call the preloaded spoon approach. So actually chatted with Jill Rapley about the use of spoons in baby led weaning. Jill Rapley is the founding philosopher of the baby led weaning movement. She's the coauthor of the original baby led weaning book in episode 1 42, we did an interview together.

Katie Ferraro (7m 57s):

It's called debunking the biggest BLW myths with Jill Rapley PhD. If you want to hear direct from Jill's mouth or opinions about using spoon as the person who started baby led weaning, go check out episode 1 42. So you can start with a thin puree of avocado on a preloaded spoon. I'll puree, the avocado, which is right with a fork or spoon, just mash it up in a bowl using ripe soft avocado, mix it with breastmilk and or formula until it drips easily off of my BLW spoon. And the BLW spoons that I use are called the tiny spoon that's from the company, easy peasy. So the tiny spoon was designed by their feeding expert, Dawn Winkelman. She's a pediatric swallowing expert.

Katie Ferraro (8m 38s):

She's the speech-language pathologist. Dawn's actually the one who coined the term preloaded spoon that we use. So prolifically now and her tiny spoon is an award winning spoon. It's actually the only baby led weaning spoon on the market. So if you want to check out the tiny spoons@easypeasyfund.com, you can use my discount code. Katie 10 will get you 10% off everything at easy-peasy, including those tiny spoons, which are great when you're just starting out. So I'll do that thin puree of avocado mixed with breast milk or formula on a preloaded spoon. I serve it out of their tiny bowl. It's another product from easy-peasy. It's a silicone suction bowl helps facilitate independent feeding. You can put the preloaded spoon in your baby's hand, you pass it to your baby's hand and you allow your baby to bring the hand to their mouth.

Katie Ferraro (9m 24s):

The point with baby led weaning is that we as the adults or the caregivers are not the one putting the spoon in the baby's mouth, we teach the baby how to do that themselves. And they certainly can do that from six months on. So you can do five minutes of the thin puree, and then you can move on to a chunkier puree. I'll take another tiny bowl and do just avocado mashed on its own till it's soft and put on that preloaded spoon. And again, allow the baby to bring it to their mouth. Do that for five minutes. And then in the final five minutes of the feed, I'll do slices of avocado. So just soft strips of avocado, about the length of my adult pinky finger, put a few strips of those in the tiny bowl and let the baby scoop or rake them up using his or her whole hand grasp. They might bring a little to their mouth.

Katie Ferraro (10m 5s):

They might not get any of it in their mouth. There might be such a minimal amount of it eaten that you're like, oh my gosh, it doesn't seem like they're eating. And I don't want you to stress out if you are just starting out with baby led weaning, please know that the first few days and weeks, sometimes even months, there's very, very, very minimal amounts of food going on. Oh, we just did an episode, 1 45. That was called my baby. Isn't eating very much. What's wrong. Make sure you listen to that. If you're stressed about the amount of food that your baby is or is not eating, but I do want to remind you that it really does not matter. The point of baby led weaning is to allow your baby ample opportunity to learn how to eat. We don't want to be focusing so much on what or how much they're eating.

Katie Ferraro (10m 46s):

Now, speaking about what they're eating. Sometimes you hear people say things like, oh, food before one is just for fun. And I I've done a lot of goddamn led episodes on that saying, and I take issue with it. Cause I want you guys to have fun feeding your baby. But I also think that that same food before one is just for fun. Sometimes implies that the food that we feed our babies do not matter. And that's certainly not true. The foods that we do feed our babies do matter. And I like avocados because they're packed with nutrition. So for moving into the benefits of feeding your baby avocado, nutrition is certainly right up there. There are over 20 vitamins and minerals in an avocado. Now, again, I don't want you to get bogged down with micrograms and milligrams of the different vitamins and minerals that your baby's eating, but I also don't want you feeding your baby flaming hot Cheetos and regular Dr.

Katie Ferraro (11m 31s):

Pepper because that's of course not a wise nutrition choice. So I like avocados because we're getting in the habit of feeding nutrient dense foods. But again, don't stress out if your baby isn't actually eating very much early on avocados are also really important because they contain fat. They avocados are a high fat food. Actually it's one of only two fruits that contain fat. The other one is coconut. And when your baby really gets going with self-defeating, that fat from the avocado and other high-fat foods is important because your baby's brain is still developing and babies need the fatty acids from the fat and the foods that we're feeding in order to facilitate that brain growth. I also love avocados because their texture is ideal. A ripe avocado is a perfect soft texture that we want to feed to babies.

Katie Ferraro (12m 15s):

We don't feed a lot of raw, crispy, hard crunchy foods, especially fruits and vegetables. There's lots of way to make those crispier ones safer, but avocados start out not being crispy. They're nice and soft to begin with. So they're minimal preparation, which I like when we're starting solids as well. Now some of you might be wondering, do I feed my baby the whole avocado? Like these can be expensive depending upon where you live and heck no, baby. As I mentioned does not eat very much early on in baby led weaning. That's super typical, but you can, if you're starting out just feeling frustrated, check out that episode 1 45. It's a part of my BLW basic series and it's called my baby. Isn't eating very much. What's wrong. Your baby's not gonna eat a whole avocado on day.

Katie Ferraro (12m 55s):

One of baby led weaning. You can actually reuse the avocado for future. A good tip is, you know, once you cut the avocado and the flesh of the avocado is exposed to oxygen, the Browning process will start that's oxygenation at work. So you might be aware that vitamin C is an anti oxidant. So it prevents the oxidative process. So if you take a lemon or lime lemon juice, lime juice, orange juice, anything with vitamin C in it, and you kind of spread it over the cut surface of the avocado. And then I wrap it either in plastic or put it in some sort of a food storage container and put it back in your fridge. It will stay good and you can reuse it the next day or later that day. And even if there's a little bit of brownie, you can actually just scrape the top off and then you'll find the nice green flesh underneath it, which tends to be a little bit easier for the baby to eat.

Katie Ferraro (13m 42s):

We don't want them to have like a hard or crispy surface. So I hope you guys have learned a little bit about avocados. They are again, one of my favorite foods for baby led weaning. I think they're ideal for the first day. You don't have to do it, but again, if you're looking for a suggestion, a lot of tips today on how to safely feed your baby avocados and for more information about giving your baby a safe start to solid foods, don't forget to check out my free online workshop. Baby led weaning for beginners. I actually go through the first 10 days of baby led weaning. So I start with avocados, but I show you how to follow my five step feeding framework. So you're offering your baby the right variety of different textures and different types of foods. I also give away my hundred first foods list to everybody on that free workshop.

Katie Ferraro (14m 24s):

And you can sign up for this week's workshop times at baby led, weaning.com, happy national avocado day. And I love seeing all of your pictures of your babies, trying avocados. I know most of you do that on day one, tag me on Instagram at baby led weaning team and feeding.