Baby-led weaning makes little nutritional difference vs spoon-feeding
Despite its growing popularity, there has been little scientific investigation into parents who give babies solid food to feed themselves, known as baby-led weaning
By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
1 July 2024
Baby-led weaning can be a messy business
Oscar Wong/Getty Images
Babies who hand-feed themselves solid food appear to consume the same number of calories as those given puréed food from a spoon, suggesting that such “baby-led weaning” might offer no particular nutritional benefits or drawbacks.
Despite its growing popularity, there is very little scientific understanding about baby-led weaning, says Kinzie Matzeller at the University of Colorado. To learn more, she and her colleagues asked the parents of 100 healthy, five-month-old babies living in the Denver, Colorado, area to report their babies’ food and milk intake for three days, as well as weighing the food on the plate before and after meals so they could determine how much the baby had consumed.
Read more
We’re finally working out why the Mediterranean diet is so good for us
Advertisement
The parents provided these food intake reports again when the babies were nine and 12 months old. Matzeller’s team weighed and measured the babies at each of these points in time.
Using the diet records, the researchers identified 35 infants who were on a baby-led weaning system, which they defined as one in which puréed food provided less than 10 per cent of their total calories. To compare groups, the team then selected 35 conventionally fed babies that matched those in the baby-led weaning group in terms of ethnicity, sex and whether they were breastfed or given formula. Matzeller presented her findings in Chicago, Illinois, on 30 June at the annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition.
The researchers found no significant differences in daily energy intake – as defined by the number of calories consumed per kilogram of the baby’s body weight – at any point between the groups. The baby-led weaning infants were consuming about 22 per cent more protein than the other babies at the nine-month mark, but this evened back out by 12 months.
