What is a Primal Baby?
Brad:
This is our daughter Kaiya. She just turned one year of age and this is the first in the series of videos we are doing on the Primal Baby / Kids. We are going to show you how we have been feeding her since the age of six months on whole foods and also want to show you this book “Baby-led Weaning” which we found to be really helpful for getting babies from breast feeding to the combination of breast feeding and eating solids. I will hand you over to my wife now (Bex) who will give you a bit more of the specifics about how we prepare her eating area, what sort of things she eats, and then there will be another video showing you like, a day in the life of, what she does actually eat.
Before we eat, we spray Kaiya’s eating surface with plain white vinegar in a spray bottle, or pro-biotic spray…this is putting good bacteria on the surface, not ant-bacterial but pro-biotic. Then that way she can eat off the surface and throw her food around. Then we also put a plastic mat down on the floor underneath the chair, so if she drops food or if she throws food we can just put it back up on the table and she can continue to play and eat.
Kaiya’s meals are just as the same as ours. She has a wide variety of foods. The food is not puréed or mashed up. It’s served to her in smaller bits so she can hold on to it with her little hands. This type of feeding, not spoon-feeding and not mashing up the food, serves several purposes.
Primal Baby – Kaiya was breast fed for 2 years and fed real solid food from the age of 6 months.
1/ It makes her very dexterous, as you can see she gets very good with her hands. She can pick up little tiny peas with her fingers, and she can hold large chicken drumsticks with her hands.
2/ She learns what food is, what it looks like, what it smells like, what the textures are like and she learns about all the different types of foods.
3/ She learns how far she can put food into her mouth. Babies’ gag reflexes are further forward than adults, so if they have a chance to learn how to move food around in their mouth, they can discover how far back they can go without choking. When she first started eating, she would gag up the food sometimes, but after a couple of weeks she stopped doing that, as she learned how far she can put the food.
4/ Lastly, but not least important, she learns how to chew. So rather than having food that’s all soupy and mashed she has real textures and she learns how to chew her food which is an important part of digestion.
For the following-up video, watch Primal Kids – Real Food for Growing Bodies!
Primal Baby – Baby Led Weaning – No More Mashed-Up Food! – February 2013
