Southern Belle continues to impress me. She is deliberately feeding Quicksilver all manner of foods that I would not have considered.
S.B. is very goal oriented. She wants Quicksilver to be at home any place in the world. That means Quicksilver needs to be able to happily tuck into vending-machine fare and French-fried chicken feet, mutilated monkey meet, and French-fried eyeballs floating in a pool of blood with equal enthusiasm.
How sad that so many American children ages 10-through-26 will only eat DiGiorno pepperoni pizza and drink Mango-Loco Monster drinks. What about tripe, pig's feet, crawdads, malanga, vegemite, kefir, miso, hummus and papaya?
Southern Belle also has Quicksilver drinking from a standard cup at 9 months. I was impressed.
But what about food allergies????
The current thinking is that exposing children to foods with a high risk of allergies between ages 6 months and 11 months is optimal. Our bodies have tonsils and adenoids whose function is to sense the food (like the whiskers on a catfish) and inform the body's immune system to not respond...that it is FOOD.
Compulsive avoidance of those foods means that the child first encounters the trigger with their skin and the body hyper-responds.
Folk wisdom holds that Native American women would smear sap from Poison Ivy around their nipples so their nursing children were exposed to ursodiol and were immune to Poison Ivy (and Poison Oak and Sumac) dermatitis. One can only imagine the first Pilgrim telling his wife to do the same, and the resulting consequences.
Another advantage of a versified diet is that if things went as bad as the doom sayers claim one can eat what is available. I would say that I would have to be desperate to eat bugs!
ReplyDeleteI remember reading about British expeditions to the far corners of the world in the 1800s found that the best teammates came from the upper class - not because they were stronger and could handle uncomfortable conditions, but because the upper classes were used to eating a lot of different, fancy foods. The ordinary farmers and city folk had very plain diets back then, and wouldn't eat 'funny stuff' even when that was all that was available during the expedition.
ReplyDeleteSounds like Southern Belle has the right idea!
She's smart. That's what we did with our kids. Not by design, but just because we didn't buy food just for them, and no processed foods. With our youngest, we even gave up baby food. We got a food mill and she ate what everyone else was eating.
ReplyDeleteThey grew up with fresh food, and it's given them all a wide palate and they all can cook.
Close Dr. friend who just retired was telling me about this. The research that what Southern Belle is doing is exactly the correct way to keep from triggering allergies later. I'm immune to poison ivy or oak. Have no idea why other than spending a lot of time as a wee babe with uncle on the canal bank fishing for crappies. I learned to be very quite cause the fish could feel my vibrations from my walking.
ReplyDeleteThe only food I can't eat...and it's more of an aversion than an allergy, is Sweet Potatoes and Yams. Just smelling them cooking/baking in the oven makes me nauseous.
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