Just something that will fit in his mouth

I have known for some time that doctors really had no idea what babies should be eating beyond don't choke the baby and don't feed them a few types of food like honey which often make them sick.

Since my son is 4 months I decided to see if things were any less confused than when my daughter was little though. Nope. No one seems to bother doing the really good controlled studies where you pick a large group of babies, enforce different diets, then see who does better and worse. So we remain with a long list of things which we have done long enough that we are pretty sure the baby will live through.

I was glad to see that a few of the more annoying superstitions relating to allergies have been slowly dying though. Poking through WebMD I found the following paragraph:

Until very recently, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended waiting until at least a year to offer babies certain highly allergenic foods, including wheat, eggs, fish and shellfish, and peanuts and tree nuts. But in early 2008, it revised that recommendation, saying that there is no evidence that waiting to introduce these foods makes babies less likely to develop allergies. In fact, there is some evidence that eating some of these foods earlier may protect babies against allergies.

This had been pretty clear for some time, if nothing else the institution of those dietary rules had clearly not even put a dent into the worsening of allergies in America. At the same time there were countries feeding peanuts to babies all the time without producing any worse allergies than we have.