Nourishing Your Child

For years, doctors told parents to keep peanut away from babies. Wait until three. Delay egg. Delay the risky foods.

It was wrong. And not slightly wrong - wrong in the direction that made things worse.

When the advice reversed, peanut allergy fell by 43 per cent across a real population. That is one of the better stories in modern paediatrics, and almost nobody has told it to parents.

Dr. Ahmed Badawy is a paediatrician and neonatologist. He opens this book by admitting the profession got it wrong - because that admission teaches the most useful thing a parent can learn about feeding advice: how to tell good advice from bad, in a field where it changes constantly and is delivered with enormous confidence by people with no evidence at all.

Inside you will find:

- When a baby is actually ready for solids - three signs, not a date on a calendar
- How to introduce the allergens properly, in what form, and the step almost everyone forgets afterwards
- Gagging is not choking. Noise is reassuring; silence is the emergency
- Why iron is the one nutrient that genuinely runs short - and why too much cow's milk is the commonest cause of toddler iron deficiency
- Why offering a rejected food two or three times is roughly a quarter of the way through
- Why every instinct at a difficult mealtime - bribing, bargaining, praising, restricting - makes it worse
- What children should actually drink, by age
- Feeding children when there is no time, no money and no energy
- How to handle weight, in both directions, without causing harm
- Why you must never remove gluten before coeliac testing

Grounded in current evidence from ESPGHAN, the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics and Cochrane reviews, with a full reference list. Seven illustrations and practical reference tables. Written for parents with no medical background.

You decide what is offered, and when. Your child decides whether to eat it, and how much.