Be a Conscious Mom! If you are feeding Biscuits to your babies, then you must read this before offering it next time!
Since the advent of packed biscuits, it tricked the minds of people to make its way into every home disguising as a baby friendly product. Many of us were conditioned through the highly visual ads to believe Milk and various biscuit combos were super healthy snack for both the babies and toddlers. Even the acquainted neighbours advice us to introduce biscuits to babies. And almost every brand of biscuits never fails to advertise the same.
No More Biscuits to Babies!
In current era, it seems too lame to stick on to the ideas from unknown sources. After all, you need not ought to be a researcher or scientist to figure out which is good & bad product to base yourself on. A minute of skimming on the ingredient list that too available on the biscuit labels will guide you more and make you enough informative.
Lets Break it Down: The Ingredient List
Once you skim down, you will find almost all the biscuits were merely a combination of refined wheat flour, derivatives of sugar, refined oils, added flavours and preservatives. These combinations of biscuits have almost zero nutritional values. All it can do to the babies is they just fill their tummies and disturb their appetite as it is the combination of ingredients which all makes digestion harder enough to make babies go longer between the meals with loss of appetite.
Let’s decode the commercial biscuit ingredients here.
- Refined wheat flour
- Sugar
- Refined vegetable oil
- Invert sugar syrup
- Iodised salt
- Raising agents
- Milk solids
- Emulsifiers
- Added flavours
Refrain Refined Flour
Here the key ingredient used in this biscuit is refined wheat flour. The name “wheat flour” implies heavy leaning towards neutralizing the biscuits as healthy treats. But on turning our eye towards “refining” shouts the truth, as refining involves stripping off all the nutrients and dietary fibres from the whole wheat grain.
It not only have zero nutritional values, but also it mess up with the baby’s digestion process and causes constipation.
Say No to Sugary Treats
Sugar is the sweetest danger that deteriorates the health in all possible ways from babies to adults.It enfolds no sweet reason to add sugar in the diet than its sweet taste. It has no fibre, no vital nutrients, just an empty calories, which leads to type 2 diabetes and also pave the way for increased risk of tooth cavities, cholesterol level, heart attack, obesity, cancer, fatty liver disease and much more.
Especially sugar in babies leads to
- Tooth decay
- Hyperactivity
- Obesity
- Type 2 diabetes
- Rejection of Breast milk and other essential nutritional fruits and vegetables.
Refined Oil : Refrained Nutrients
Refining oils refers to processing the vegetable oil that involves heavy chemical processing at very high temperature. During the process, the vegetable oil gets descended in all of its nutritional values and flavours.
It’s not advisable to use these oils on baby diets. Only virgin oil or organic oil is recommended to be a part of baby’s diet as it has a good fats and active natural ingredients preserved in it.
Invert Sugar Syrup
As the name “Invert sugar syrup” may look flashy, but it is same as the normal table sugar in the matter of nutritional profile. Sugar is processed to invert sugar syrup to give a smooth texture to the biscuits. The only difference we can spot is the table sugar is of granules form as invert sugar syrup is a liquid.
Iodised Salt
You shou6not add salt in Baby foods until the baby reaches one year as their tiny kidney can’t handle too much salt (more than 1g per day)
Raising Agents
Adding raising agents to the baking mixtures helps to raise the volume of products and making the final product more porous and less harder. Baking soda and baking powder are the most common raising agents employed in baking biscuits. By adding these agents in the mixture, they help in incorporating air bubbles by releasing carbon dioxide. Both these ingredients has more of sodium bicarbonate, which is not a baby friendly food product.
Processed Milk
Milk solids are dried power which is left after removing the water content from cow’s milk. It can be either contain full-fat or fat free. We shouldn’t introduce cow’s milk to babies until one year.
Emulsifiers
Emulsifiers are additives derived from algae species. Adding it o the baking mixtures encourages the suspension of liquids. They are rich in fat and sugars and they have a bad impact on overall dietary patterns in babies.
Don’t Favor the Flavours
Vanilla extracts are the most common ingredient in baking process. This extract is nothing but a vanilla bean extracts extracted after soaking it in ethanol. This ethanol is the same alcohol in beer, wine, and spirits. There are no health benefits of consuming this vanilla extract and it also has a risk for allergic responses and alcohol poisoning in babies.
As we have found all the wrong reasons to make biscuits out of the baby’s meal plan above, let’s say no to biscuits for babies.
Now I get your nerves of puzzlement on better alternatives to biscuits for babies!
Homemade Cookies
Here the classic alternative is crafting your own biscuit recipes for your little versions!
Homemade cookies are always a vintage recipe that marks it’s quality and holds healthy & hygienic combo. This choice will reward you to craft your own cookies by choosing among almost all of nutrient rich grains & cereals of the world. You can craft cookies with Finger Millet Cookies, Oats-Raisin Cookies, Multigrain Cookies, Whole Wheat Chocochip Cookies, Oats Chocochip Cookies and much more. You have a wide variety of choice to go among sugar-free cookies, jaggery cookies, brown-sugar cookies and much more.
Feed Healthy Food! Live Happy Life!