Pouches of puréed baby food can seem like a godsend to busy parents, but some experts say that babies and toddlers who use them too much can miss out on the developmental skills that will contribute to healthy eating habits. One potential problem is that pouches may oversimplify the eating process, leaving fewer opportunities for babies to practice the oral and fine motor skills they need to use utensils and to eat more textured foods. For example, babies can suck from a pouch using similar mouth and tongue movements as when they breastfeed or drink from a bottle. Pouched baby foods are marketed for babies as young as 4 months, and since they’re easy for babies to suck down, this might encourage parents to add too much pureed food to their babies’ diets too early. “As semi-liquids that could fill up the baby, they are not good nutritional substitutes for breastmilk or formula in early life,” said Dr. Steven Abrams, M.D., chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Nutrition. Anecdotally, some professionals say they’re observing delays in motor development among kids overly dependent on the pouches. Ruth McGivern, M.A., a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Philadelphia, said that she and her colleagues had noticed that some of their toddler clients were learning to self-feed with a spoon later than usual, and that she was “pretty sure reliance on the pouches is part of the reason.” On its own, taking longer to learn to use a spoon wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, she said, but she worries that these toddlers are missing out on an important stage of food exploration. “Without the opportunity to smear food all over their faces, and lick it off with their tongues, and wave the spoon around while they play with the food in their other hand, young toddlers tend to lose their curiosity about food and become more and more dependent on either the pouches or their parent spoon-feeding them. Research suggests that kids use all their senses to learn about food. Having the opportunity to see, smell and play with food can increase a toddler’s acceptance of new foods, according to studies published in the journal Appetite, and pouches don’t allow for that full sensory experience vegetables are introduced to kids only in pouch form, their taste is probably masked. “When you’re mixing it with other flavors, there’s no guarantee that they’re able to taste it in the way that they need to in order to learn to like that flavor over time,” said Kameron Moding, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in pediatric nutrition at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, whose research has shown that most packaged baby and toddler vegetable products, including pouches, are blended with fruits or sweet vegetables. The Negative Effects Of Children using Pouches: Every time a baby or toddler sits down to eat presents a learning opportunity in more ways than one. And unfortunately, pouches detract from that learning more than they contribute to it. Eating — whether it’s by hand or getting spoon-fed — entails using fine motor skills, coordination, and specific oral mechanics. It’s a tactile experience that furthers a child’s developmental abilities in multiple areas. If eating is an actual activity, “eating” from a pouch is passive. It is, in a way, a lost developmental learning opportunity. When children eat solids — including purees — they’re learning to take bites, to move food around in their mouths, to use their tongues, and to chew. Pouches demand none of this of children. As Kara Larson, a feeding specialist and speech language pathologist at Boston Children’s Hospital said in an interview: “if children are just sucking from a pouch all the time, we worry that some of that tactile experience with food might be lost.” Eating is also a sensory experience, and this is another area in which pouches come up short. Babies and toddlers learning to eat take ineverything about foods — feeling, seeing, and smelling are a huge part of how they learn about different foods. With pouches, all this sensory intake is essentially lost: children can’t see what color their “food” is, can’t smell it by and large, and don’t feel its textures. Not to mention, to a large extent,they also can’t even really taste it. Here’s what I mean… The main ingredient in most pouches tends to be a sweet food, usually a fruit. And those sweet foods effectively dominate the entire flavor profile. So even if a pouch does contain spinach or broccoli or the like, children can’t taste it. Like, at all. Indeed, partly because of this sweet-taste-masking effect, young children usually can’t differentiate between any of the flavors in any given pouch. I found it helpful to consider what’s going on for me whenever I have a smoothie — I can often pull out some of the individual flavors, but not all of them. And even the singular tastes I can detect, I can only detect because I already know what they taste like. Babyhood and toddlerhood together comprise a critical period of time for learning about foods — and learning to like foods! If toddlers don’t have experience with actual vegetables, they may be less likely to enjoy them down the road. As pediatrician Dr. Natalie Muth told the Times, “kids need the taste of what the actual food is to come to like it later.” IOW, apple-pear-kale pouches aren’t helping children learn to love kale. All of this is to say that children don’t learn much about foods (if anything at all) from pouches — they’re not becoming familiar with the foods or even the flavors included — which is a problem because this is a huge piece of how children come to actually like foods. Pro's: Baby food pouches are fun for kids, and combined with the fact that they can feed themselves, I suspect it’s why we see some kids not wanting to give them up. There is no denying that baby food pouches are incredibly convenient. They slide right into a purse or a diaper bag, and whether you squeeze some out onto a spoon first or just hand the whole thing to your child, the mess is much less. References: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/well/rethinking-baby-food-pouches.html https://yourkidstable.com/baby-food-pouches-vs-jars/
