Earlier this fall I had a chance to meet with one of the foremost authorities on child nutrition, Cordon Bleu chef and renowned author of over 16 books, Annabel Karmel. Lovely and diminutive, Annabel shared with me the tragedy of losing her first child and how it set her on a path of helping parents improve their children’s lives through healthy eating habits.   

A British national, Annabel was in Toronto promoting the Canadian release of her latest book More First Meals, a follow-up to the wildly popular First Meals, first published in 2003.

Elana Safronsky: How did this book come about?
Annabel Karmel: I wrote First Meals about five years, and it became very popular because it takes you through all the stages of feeding your baby, like when you should introduce chicken, meat, fish, cheese, and right up to feeding the whole family together with one meal. It was so successful that I decided to follow that up with More First Meals, which just came out, and it’s got loads of new recipes as well as a feature which helps you create meal plans for your baby; suggestion on what you can prepare ahead, a place for your baby shopping list and a section where you write down what your child likes, so that you can keep a record. It’s also good for keeping track of allergies and reactions to certain meals – the format is quite helpful.

E.S.:  Tell me a bit about what set you on this path?
A.K.:  I’ve been working and writing for children for over 16 years. I lost my first child due to an infection that spread to her brain – she was only 17 weeks old. That was awful. You go home and you’re no longer a mother and your whole world falls apart. The only thing that had gotten me together was that within five months I had gotten pregnant again, which was fantastic, because it had taken me two years to get pregnant with Natasha [the first child], and I gave birth to Nicholas. Despite the rather precarious circumstance of his birth – I delivered him on the stairs in our house, with only my husband present because he came so quickly – Nicholas was fortunately fine. But as he grew up he was a very bad eater, and after the whole ordeal I wanted to work with children, to do something to improve other children’s lives. So I decided to write my first book on feeding your child in 1991, which I dedicated to Natasha.

It was a hit, and many parents still use that particular book. That’s how it became a career for me.

E.S.: What is your ethos? 
A.K.:  Right from the start I think it’s important that parents give their kids fresh food, even if they give them jars as well. It helps children to not be picky eaters later on, because they get used to the taste of real food. I try to make it easy for parents; recipes with things like mashed banana and avocado, or you can make chicken and apple puree, and all in big batches so you can freeze it. Babies grow more in their first year than any other time, so what you feed them in that year is vitally important.  

E.S.:  When do you start what, when starting with solids?
A.K.:  Many parents don’t know when to chose certain foods like eggs, chicken, meat – I work with all types of experts and nutritionists, and a lot of the advice you’re given isn’t based on scientific fact. If you look at the American Academy of Paediatrics, they believe in giving chicken and fish from six months on, and I believe that as well. A child’s iron supply in the first six months is inherited from the mother, but after six months that runs out, and one of the best sources of iron is red meat. You can mix a little bit of red meat with vegetables, and the same with fish, and eggs. These are all good foods, and people don’t give them to their children early enough. There’s no scientific evidence at all that shows the child will develop an allergy if you introduce these foods earlier than a year. In fact, in countries like Israel, where they have a very popular snack for very young children that contains peanuts, there number of children with peanut allergies is a lot lower than in North America. Avoiding all these foods can actually do more harm than good.

E.S.:  What are the most common food allergies in babies? 
A.K.:  The most common are milk and eggs. I talk about all this in the book because there’s a lot of misinformation about allergies and food. Often a child will grow out of a milk and egg allergy. Fish allergy as well. But the number of children who have allergies is actually very small. Unless you have allergies in the family or your child has hay fever, eczema or asthma, it’s unlikely that your child will have food allergies. So you can give eggs to your child from six months on, provided they’re well cooked. This way you’ll know for certain straight way if your child is allergic to eggs, there’s no point of withholding it for a year.  

E.S.:  Is there an Oldwives' tale that you’d like to dispel? 
A.K.: That children like bland food. That’s what everybody was told when I wrote my first book.

I test everything I do on 20 babies. I did this one test where I had given some babies food with garlic or cheese, and others got plain potato, and what we found was that they didn’t in fact like bland food; they liked the food that had some taste to it. 

 
Also, the adult diet of low fat, high fibre is not good for babies. They need fat in their diets. So things like avocado, adding cheese to vegetable purees, or even adding butter to a carrot puree, is a very good idea. Too much fibre is also not good for a baby, because it will fill their tummies. Babies’ tummies are very, very small. They need nutrient-dense food because they’re growing rapidly; if they get full too fast, they won’t get all the nutrients they need. A lot of people don’t realize that.


E.S.:  What about the whole, If they’re not eating, don’t force them, thing?
A.K.:  I agree with that. But at the same time I know everyone says not to worry, but you do because you’re their mom. So finger foods become very important here. I do things like salmon balls that you could freeze and they then can pick them up and eat them on their own. I also make little hamburgers and chicken nuggets, because quite often unless they can feed themselves, they’re not going to eat.  

E.S.:  But they play with their food a lot and don’t ingest as much as if you were to feed them…
A.K.:  But the more you let them play with food, the more they experiment with their food, the quicker they will learn how to feed themselves properly. And it is very messy, I don’t think you can avoid it. Also, you don’t need to be cleaning their face all the time. Just take a deep breath, and let them go at it.

E.S.:  What’s the most common mistake that parents make when starting solids?
A.K.:  Not giving their children enough variety. I start with root vegetables, and then move on to fruits, and so on. People used to say Give your baby the same food for three days, and I don’t believe that. I believe in giving your child a variety of foods, and then you start combinations. I find that if the child won’t eat chicken but they love apple, a good combo is chicken, sweet potato and apple. It’s a good way for them to be introduced to savoury tastes. I do a really nice chicken, dried apricot and tomato puree as well, which is really popular.  

E.S.:  How important is it to keep their meals square? Some children won’t eat meals, but graze all day.
A.K.:  If the grazing and snacking is on healthy foods, then it doesn’t really matter. Some children eat more food at snack time than at meal time. Also, have snacks prepared because they won’t wait. If you catch the right moment, they could eat a good amount. And avoid giving snacks too close to meal time.  

E.S.: How long should you keep frozen meals that you’ve made?
A.K.:  Eight weeks. Maybe even longer but that’s particular to the kind of food and your freezer. I freeze many of the meals I make, in fact almost everything in my book is freezable.

E.S.:  What’s a good tip on how to get the preparing and the freezing of baby food down to a science? 
A.K.:  First of all you want to freeze it shortly after you cook it. Cool it down and then freeze it fast, and that preserves the nutrients. Don’t have it hanging around in the fridge for a couple of days. Also, always prepare in bulk. I have a friend with whom I trade leftovers from when I cook in bulk, and we end up with three or four meals already prepared.

E.S.:  What’s your stance on jarred baby food?
A.K.:  A jar has a shelf life of over two years. It’s heated at very high temperatures to be sterilized, which means a lot of the nutrients are gone. I think it’s OK, just not as the mainstay of their diet. You don’t get things like salmon in baby food, it’s impossible to find, and salmon is so important in the first year because the lipids go toward building a baby’s brain. Also the quality and quantity of meat in baby foods is very small, and they’re bland, which doesn’t help with eating family foods. You may save time in the short run, but at the end of the day you’ll probably get a much more picky eater. If you just took your chicken casserole for example, or anything that you are making for yourself or the rest of the family, pureed it and froze it, that would be much better for your baby than jarred food. Once you give your baby fresh food, they won’t eat jars anymore.

E.S.:  What are the most common reasons why children refuse to eat?
A.K.:  Asserting their independence, a fear of something new, and asserting their power over their parents. The more fuss we make the more your child is going to make a fuss but if you ignore it and there’s no reaction, the child won’t make a fuss anymore.  

A common mistake that many parents make is giving their child something else that’s often less healthy, just so the child eats something. That’s how you get into the trap of your child eating only unhealthy foods. They learn to demand. When your child makes a fuss, simply put the food away and say, "Well, I can see you’re not hungry right now." And eventually they learn.  


E.S.:  Anything else you’d like to say to parents on feeding their children?
A.K.:  Vegetables!  Hide vegetables in things they already like – like the Hidden Vegetables Bolognese I make – great for the whole family. It’s got apple in it, and I use apple for lots of foods to help children eat foods they’re not yet comfortable eating. And also, don’t shy away from interesting ethnic foods. Foods from around the world are great for kids. I do a range in the supermarket for kids four years and up called World Foods, which includes Enchiladas and Chicken Tikka Masala, and it’s very popular. I design menus for nurseries in England and we did a survey with a thousand children from one of the larger nursery chains on their favourite foods, and you know what they said? Chicken curry!

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