From six months of age your baby’s nutritional needs change. You will have to introduce complementary feeding to achieve a balanced diet in which fruits, cereals, meat, fish are present and legumes. However, jars can also be part of that diet. They are not only a good option when you don’t have time to prepare the puree at home, but they are also very convenient if you have to go out with your baby.
In fact, a study carried out at the University of Murcia and the La Fe Health Research Institute concluded that industrial jars and homemade purees have a similar nutritional profile. In some cases, the jars even contain less salt since at home it is easy to overdo it. The key, as pediatricians indicate, is to choose the recipes well, that they are well prepared and that they contain the right nutrients. Potitos® Nutribén® do not have added salt and we can see the wide variety of ingredients that they contain both on the front of the label and in the list on the back.
How to select the ideal jars for the children’s diet?
1. Make sure it’s appropriate for your baby’s age
A baby doesn’t eat the same thing at six months of age as at a year. She also does not have the same nutritional needs and energy demands. Just think that babies go from needing just 550 calories a day during the first months to demanding 1,050 when they reach one year of age. That is why it is essential that you choose the right jar for their stage of development.
The most common labels that you can find catalog the jars in 6, 8 and 12 months, which indicates the age from which it is recommended to consume the product. These products are not only adjusted from the energy and nutritional point of view to the evolutionary stage, but also have different textures, so that babies do not reject them and can eat them without difficulty.
2. Thoroughly check the ingredients
The age indicated on the product is not the only detail you should take into account when choosing the most suitable jar for your baby. You should also pay attention to its ingredients, to make sure that they comply with the indications that the pediatrician has given you.
The Nutrition Committee of the Spanish Association of Pediatrics warns that “there is no evidence that delaying the introduction of potentially allergenic foods beyond 6 months prevents the development of allergies to them”, so they recommend gradually introducing them into the child’s diet, so that it is as varied and balanced as possible.
Therefore, if you want to make sure you choose the most suitable jars for your baby, you better look at their ingredients. In this sense, Nutribén® is very careful. In addition, it has just launched a new format of Potitos® Nutribén® with varied recipes for meat, fish and fruit, so that your baby can have a more complete and balanced diet. Of course, their products do not contain salt or added sugars, as well as being free of additives, colorants and preservatives. And they have been made with 100% extra virgin olive oil.
3. Learn to decipher the label
The jars should be part of a varied and balanced diet, so it is important that you know the proportions of their ingredients. So you can know how much veal there is in that jar of beef with green beans and carrots or exactly what fruit is in the jar of Macedonia.
To find out, you have to read the list of ingredients on the jar. As a general rule, the ingredients that are found in the greatest quantity are the first on the list. You can also find those ingredients that can cause allergies or food intolerances marked in bold. This way you can know if a jar is gluten-free, what types of additives or oils it contains and if they have added milk.
The new packages of Potitos® Nutribén®, for example, have more intuitive names for the ingredients in the recipe so that you can easily understand them. They also provide the right amount of nutrients for each stage of development and are presented as a homogeneous mixture, so that your baby always eats the right proportion of nutrients. In addition, Nutribén® only chooses the best quality ingredients and its recipes contain less water than homemade purées, so they give babies more energy to start discovering the world.