As a parent, we want to do the very best for our children. Many parents often agonize over such decisions as to whether to breast feed or bottle feed, whether to use cloth diapers or disposable ones. It is only natural to do this as you want your child to grow up as healthy and happy as possible. Now, your child is old enough to start eating baby food and you are faced with another dilemma, which is better homemade or store bought food for your baby?

While there is no doubt that homemade baby food is better for your child for several reasons, there simply may be times when making your own infant food is simply out of the question. Probably, the wisest decision is to serve your baby a combination of store bought and homemade food for you little one. This way you can give your baby a well rounded diet and still see that he gets more important vitamins and nutrients than from store bought foods alone.

Benefits of Homemade Baby Food

The most important benefit to giving your baby at least some homemade baby food is that by doing so you can give him more of the important vitamins and minerals that will help him to grow and help to keep his immune system healthy. The high heat needed to produce store bought baby foods robs these foods of much of their vitamins. Especially A and B.

Homemade food for you baby contain less fillers and additives. When you make your child a jar of homemade pears at home, all you put into his pears is the pears themselves and enough water to make the pears a suitable consistency for your child to eat. Store bought baby foods contain additives to help prolong the shelf life of the food, as well as fillers such as flour and syrup. Which means your child is getting less real food and more junk in store bought food.

Homemade meals for your baby also costs less, for the most part you can make a baby version of whatever you are eating for dinner if you eat fresh fruits, vegetables and meats. You can simply prepare your babies meal while cooking your own dinner.

What You Should Know About Homemade Baby Food

Before deciding whether to make your own food for your baby you will need to do some research to know what is safe to feed your baby and what is not. Certain foods should not be fed to babies under a year old as they have a tendency to be allergic to them or they contain bacteria that can be harmful to a very young child. There are also other foods, which you can purchase in store bought baby foods that you should not try and make at home because they contain certain minerals that need to be limited in a baby's diet. Commercial baby food manufactures can measure these minerals, but you will be unable to at home without proper expensive equipment.

While feeding your infant homemade infant food is certainly a healthy choice for your child, a combination of homemade and store bought food is probably the best way to feed your baby a varied and convenient diet.Jeffrey William