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Last Updated: Jul 2nd, 2008 - 21:15:22 |
(NC)-Dr. Richard Theuer, an infant nutritionist and consultant to Beech-Nut Nutrition, explains the importance of structure in your baby's eating regiment:
Initially, your newborn infant will eat every two to three hours - making it eight, 10, or even 12 times a day - and he or she seems to be sleeping almost all the time in between. If you are breastfeeding, it may be difficult to get much rest during the first few weeks. Soon, though, babies start to sense when it is day and when it is night.
By about three months of age their day-night cycles can be very much like those of adults and your baby starts to follow an eating pattern that ultimately becomes the childhood norm: breakfast is followed by a mid-morning snack, lunch is followed by a mid-afternoon snack, and dinner is frequently followed by a pre-bedtime feeding.
It is actually possible to begin training your baby to follow such a schedule from the first weeks, which is a proven way of increasing the chances that a baby will sleep through the night as early as eight weeks of age.
Constant snacking throughout the day, rather than eating larger regular meals, weakens the appetite-signalling system that helps us regulate how much we eat by how hungry we are. Constant snacking also becomes "reward eating" that is addictive. It has even been suggested that allowing older infants to breastfeed as often as they like - which can be 15 times a day - encourages the habit of constant snacking in childhood.
Nevertheless, moms who breastfeed are less controlling and less restrictive of their children's eating behaviour, with the positive outcome that breastfed infants are less likely to become overweight children and have more self-control of their food intakes.
Breastfed babies also are more likely to accept new foods, perhaps because they are exposed through breast milk to the flavours of the variety of foods that their mothers eat. Using breast milk to make up baby cereal can increase your baby's acceptance of the cereal.
Ultimately, you should focus on what your baby eats in a day, not in each meal. The amount of food that a baby eats at each eating occasion - meal or scheduled snack - can vary widely. The amount consumed at the mid-morning snack will be influenced by how much he or she ate for breakfast. However, by the end of the day, a baby consumes pretty much the same amount of food energy as he or she consumed the day before and will consume the day after.
More information on healthy nutrition for your baby is available on the Beech-Nut Helpline at 1-800-233-2468.
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