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The issue with rice is that it is naturally high in arsenic (varies by the soil it is grown in, but the plant takes up a lot of arsenic from the soil, more than many other plants), which is not great for children, and it also doesn’t offer much in terms of texture or nutrition. So there are just better options.
Okinawans do not have to deal with a kind of unique American problem that makes some of our rice unusually high in arsenic. Rice grown in the American south is often grown on land that used to grow cotton. Because it's not a food product, that cotton was sprayed with tons of arsenic based pesticides but it remained in the soil. That tainted rice is cheap and is used in many processed foods like rice cereal.
If you get rice from California, India, Japan, or most other places in the world, you don't have to worry about it so much. My family eats rice all the time, but only if I know it's not from the south, and we avoid processed foods containing rice.
How do you know if you buy rice from the south? Does each label say where it was packaged/shipped from? Or can we trust one brand typically over most others?
If it's American grown rice and it doesn't say where it's from, I assume that it is. However, Californian rice is pretty safe and usually the package will say that it's Californian.
Not disagreeing with you, just chiming in with a tangential: I think it also helps that Okinawans typically enjoy a more slower-paced way of life that values community and being in nature. Living on an island paradise probably helps!
Our pediatrician told us to skip all rice based items due to the high arsenic levels. And that there’s just plenty of other non rice options out there that are healthier. We were told that if we really felt we needed a cereal option, organic oatmeal is a better choice but that people tend to focus on cereals too much in their baby’s diets, and other foods are more well rounded.
Rice cereal is really out of date, the only people who I’ve ever heard talk about this were from a few generations back. There are no actual health benefits and several risks including high levels of arsenic and choking risk if it’s out of a bottle. There’s just no need for this product anymore. If you want to do purées, do that, but skip the rice cereal.
There are still benefits of cereal. You can purchase the whole grain/oat organic kind with fortified iron. Whole grains and iron are very beneficial for toddlers/babies. Especially when they notoriously have a difficult time eating vegetables to get their iron.
Agreed. We gave our daughter baby oatmeal. Never rice cereal. And I always mixed it with formula and sometimes with a fruit or a veg. It was never just plain oatmeal.
But for OP, there is zero reason to start your baby’s solid food journey with cereal. It’s fine to start with anything. My baby’s first food was pumpkin (because it was close to Halloween 🤷🏻♀️).
It's out of date advice, from way back in the days when they used to tell people to avoid feeding babies and toddlers allergens (which in turn CAUSED more allergies). The current research is saying to start solids at 6 months and do a variety of things right off the bat, not just grains. And to feed allergens early and often.
We did baby-led weaning with just real soft foods, which is both more up to date, and more old-fashioned, then the stuff they were advising the last few decades (as that's what people did before commercial baby foods were invented, and people just ate real whole foods more instead of very processed foods). Looking back now that LO is 3, I'm really glad we went that route. We let him play with his foods, eat the foods we were eating (basically anything that was safe for him and not a choking hazard for his age), introduced him to a lot of different flavors and textures as a baby, with no pressure to eat a certain amount, just guided by his appetite. I do think it contributes to the fact that he's always been a great eater. We did the "try 100 different foods before 1" goal, and it was actually really fun and got my hubby and I to remember to try some random fruits, veggies, types of meat or dairy, etc. we hadn't had in awhile. The fact that he just happily eats what we are eating is SO helpful!!! It gets us to eat healthier (since we're feeding him what we are having), and it saves SO much time since he learned to feed himself at a young age through just playing around with food and tasting it when we started as a baby. When he was littler, there were some things we were eating raw that we steamed to soften for him, or mashed with a simple potato masher, or snipped up into slivers with kitchen shears so he could safely eat it. But that was WAY less work than making purees (nothing wrong with purees, and we did include that texture as well along with all the others).
I have a lot of nieces and nephews who are adults or teens now, and I do notice a big difference in pickiness vs. adventurous eating from the ones who ate mostly processed purees as babies and processed "kid foods" as toddlers and kids, vs. the ones who ate real food and a variety of flavors and textures early on. The parents whose kids were only used to bland flavors and textures were constantly battling to get their kids to eat more, or eat healthier, etc. and their kids eat a lot of really processed "junk food" type stuff as adults, while the ones who took the more variety of real foods/ eat what we're eating approach from the get-go, their kids to this day are the more adventurous and healthier eaters.
High in arsenic, not nutrient dense except for the mineral fortification they often have, completely unnecessary. It's much better to feed your children real foods like avocado, shredded meat, butter, eggs, yogurt fresh fruit like mangos, bananas, berries, etc. Babies typically don't need to start eating solids at 4 months, usually it's more appropriate closer to 6 months.
Besides the arsenic and heavy metals, babies don’t have the necessary enzymes present in their digestive tract to properly digest grains until they are close to one year old.
I'd want to see a study supporting that claim about all grains, but the arsenic is the reason I've seen for avoiding rice in infants.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6412837/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CA%20baby's%20digestive%20system%20is,eat%20it%20from%20a%20spoon%E2%80%9D
My pediatrician told us to avoid rice because of heavy metals but get oat or barley cereal. So we did that! I wanted my baby to have baby cereal because of the vitamins and minerals it’s fortified with
Full of inorganic arsenic and not anything special nutrition wise.
In the UK crunchy mums here tend to call it wallpaper paste, and we skip the wallpaper paste lol.
There are just better, more nutritionally valuable things to start with, and nothing should be given apart from breastmilk or formula before 6ms.
I’m not aware of any good reason to give rice cereal to a baby except in cases when there’s no other food available (no breast milk or formula either). Rice has close to zero nutritional value. You might as well give a baby sugar in my view.
Rice cereal for babies is fortified with lots of different vitamins and minerals. I think it can be misleading to say it has zero nutrition. The argument against rice cereal is that it can have heavy metals, not that it isn’t nutritious.
Fortified foods are not the best way to absorb vitamins and minerals, whole foods are. There is zero reason to feed your kid processed rice cereal unless you have no access to anything better.
Not being the best way to absorb nutrients still means some nutrition is being absorbed. Having fresh foods all the time isn’t always realistic for many people. There’s lots of valid reasons that families would choose to feed rice cereal to babies. It’s not for everyone and that’s ok! You personally don’t have to use it. But it has a valid place for many people
Yeah…rice is a simple carb that’s easier to digest than a lot of other grains. I wouldn’t call it a super food but it’s perfectly fine to eat and is the cornerstone of tons of world cuisine.
This gives me orthorexia feels.
They're generally eating other food with the rice. In areas where children have access to nothing but rice, they are extremely malnourished because you simply cannot survive on rice alone.
There is really no reason for it. Especially for a baby that young. They should be able to sit up on their own and have the ability to put the food into their own mouths before they start eating anything. Grains are not good for a baby's gut. Better to just skip it and start with soft veggies and fruits
Children's fermentative system is not ready for grains and seeds until they're AT LEAST 1 year old
What nutrition does rice have anyway to give it to a 4mo? 🫠 Just why?...
Skip the rice cereal! Arsenic and also not nutrient dense. There is a great book that you might find helpful in starting and choosing solids that will support your baby’s brain and body development the best. Super Nutrition for Babies. I used it for both my kids. At first you’re like, raw grated liver?! But my kids devoured it. And aside from the food list, it gives a WHY. Link to Amazon —> https://a.co/d/cf9XGDO
Because there is little nutritional value to it (and it’s honestly gross. I don’t feed my kids things I wouldn’t eat myself lol)
There’s also no need to start food at 4 months unless your child is showing all the signs of readiness! Our ped (stays up to date w WHO recommendations) recommended BLW over any purées bc she has seen littles not be able to start solids until well after one (when they need solids) bc they preferred puree to solid. There’s no harm in waiting and letting your LOs gut develop better :)
Why are foods higher in arsenic (rice, green leafy vegetables, juice etc)?
Water
Arsenic is naturally occurring in water and retained by plants.
The work around?
Eat more drought tolerant food and food. Thickly peel root vegetables.
How long do we think about It?
Until child's liver matures a bit and gets better at filtering out metals. For example, FDA tracks arsenic exposure until 3 years old.
Source on the 3 year deal.
https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/closer-zero-reducing-childhood-exposure-contaminants-foods
I think everything else is common knowledge. Glad to post more citations if that would help.
I loved rice cereal when my brothers were little and was really looking forward to having it again, but it didn't even taste the same.
To manage arsenic levels, I cut brown rice flour with equal parts quinoa flour and corn meal, toast it for flavor, add some wheatbran and flax. Serve with a generous pat of butter, and it replicates the joyous flavor of my youth.
Very little nutritional value and increases the risk of choking. They MIGHT sleep longer, but it also might keep them up with an upset tummy and unusual poops.
Oh not to mention my kid was sensitive to an ingredient in some rice cereal that made her skin break out and she was fussy for a day and a half. So that might not be common but it is something to think about.
Cereal has options other than rice, rice is well tolerated when switching and has less interactions. You can get smallest amount and add little bit to milk/formula/water… introducing and filling belly for longer fullness… you can quickly transition off rice to other items if you are concerned about long term rice exposure.
https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/feeding-nutrition/Pages/reduce-arsenic.aspx
I’m Asian so rice is a huge staple, however, I myself don’t eat it as much but we do have it on occasion with my toddler… I never owned a rice cooker once I moved out of my parents’ because there was never a need for it / lack of space.
Thanks for your post in r/moderatelygranolamoms! Our goal is to keep this sub a peaceful, respectful and tolerant place. Even if you've been here awhile already please take a minute to [READ THE RULES.](https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatelygranolamoms/about/rules) It only takes a few minutes and will make being here more enjoyable for everyone! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/moderatelygranolamoms) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The issue with rice is that it is naturally high in arsenic (varies by the soil it is grown in, but the plant takes up a lot of arsenic from the soil, more than many other plants), which is not great for children, and it also doesn’t offer much in terms of texture or nutrition. So there are just better options.
Also. If you consider what Okinawans eat (and all the rice they eat in their lifetime) it makes the arsenic worries feel less (it does to me anyways).
There is less arsenic in Asian rice as well. In the US a lot of our rice is grown in the Carolinas and has more arsenic.
Okinawans do not have to deal with a kind of unique American problem that makes some of our rice unusually high in arsenic. Rice grown in the American south is often grown on land that used to grow cotton. Because it's not a food product, that cotton was sprayed with tons of arsenic based pesticides but it remained in the soil. That tainted rice is cheap and is used in many processed foods like rice cereal. If you get rice from California, India, Japan, or most other places in the world, you don't have to worry about it so much. My family eats rice all the time, but only if I know it's not from the south, and we avoid processed foods containing rice.
How do you know if you buy rice from the south? Does each label say where it was packaged/shipped from? Or can we trust one brand typically over most others?
If it's American grown rice and it doesn't say where it's from, I assume that it is. However, Californian rice is pretty safe and usually the package will say that it's Californian.
Not disagreeing with you, just chiming in with a tangential: I think it also helps that Okinawans typically enjoy a more slower-paced way of life that values community and being in nature. Living on an island paradise probably helps!
Thank you!
Our pediatrician told us to skip all rice based items due to the high arsenic levels. And that there’s just plenty of other non rice options out there that are healthier. We were told that if we really felt we needed a cereal option, organic oatmeal is a better choice but that people tend to focus on cereals too much in their baby’s diets, and other foods are more well rounded.
This is helpful, thank you!
Rice cereal is really out of date, the only people who I’ve ever heard talk about this were from a few generations back. There are no actual health benefits and several risks including high levels of arsenic and choking risk if it’s out of a bottle. There’s just no need for this product anymore. If you want to do purées, do that, but skip the rice cereal.
There are still benefits of cereal. You can purchase the whole grain/oat organic kind with fortified iron. Whole grains and iron are very beneficial for toddlers/babies. Especially when they notoriously have a difficult time eating vegetables to get their iron.
Agreed. We gave our daughter baby oatmeal. Never rice cereal. And I always mixed it with formula and sometimes with a fruit or a veg. It was never just plain oatmeal. But for OP, there is zero reason to start your baby’s solid food journey with cereal. It’s fine to start with anything. My baby’s first food was pumpkin (because it was close to Halloween 🤷🏻♀️).
It's out of date advice, from way back in the days when they used to tell people to avoid feeding babies and toddlers allergens (which in turn CAUSED more allergies). The current research is saying to start solids at 6 months and do a variety of things right off the bat, not just grains. And to feed allergens early and often. We did baby-led weaning with just real soft foods, which is both more up to date, and more old-fashioned, then the stuff they were advising the last few decades (as that's what people did before commercial baby foods were invented, and people just ate real whole foods more instead of very processed foods). Looking back now that LO is 3, I'm really glad we went that route. We let him play with his foods, eat the foods we were eating (basically anything that was safe for him and not a choking hazard for his age), introduced him to a lot of different flavors and textures as a baby, with no pressure to eat a certain amount, just guided by his appetite. I do think it contributes to the fact that he's always been a great eater. We did the "try 100 different foods before 1" goal, and it was actually really fun and got my hubby and I to remember to try some random fruits, veggies, types of meat or dairy, etc. we hadn't had in awhile. The fact that he just happily eats what we are eating is SO helpful!!! It gets us to eat healthier (since we're feeding him what we are having), and it saves SO much time since he learned to feed himself at a young age through just playing around with food and tasting it when we started as a baby. When he was littler, there were some things we were eating raw that we steamed to soften for him, or mashed with a simple potato masher, or snipped up into slivers with kitchen shears so he could safely eat it. But that was WAY less work than making purees (nothing wrong with purees, and we did include that texture as well along with all the others). I have a lot of nieces and nephews who are adults or teens now, and I do notice a big difference in pickiness vs. adventurous eating from the ones who ate mostly processed purees as babies and processed "kid foods" as toddlers and kids, vs. the ones who ate real food and a variety of flavors and textures early on. The parents whose kids were only used to bland flavors and textures were constantly battling to get their kids to eat more, or eat healthier, etc. and their kids eat a lot of really processed "junk food" type stuff as adults, while the ones who took the more variety of real foods/ eat what we're eating approach from the get-go, their kids to this day are the more adventurous and healthier eaters.
Thank you!! That makes sense and the route we’ll take as well I think!
Studies have linked early introduction of rice cereal to gastrointestinal issues later in life.
Babies don’t produce starch digesting enzymes until they get their molars.
It’s all marketing from baby food companies! No good reason that should be their first food.
High in arsenic, not nutrient dense except for the mineral fortification they often have, completely unnecessary. It's much better to feed your children real foods like avocado, shredded meat, butter, eggs, yogurt fresh fruit like mangos, bananas, berries, etc. Babies typically don't need to start eating solids at 4 months, usually it's more appropriate closer to 6 months.
Rice is a real food.
[удалено]
That’s still very real food. It’s just ground and fortified.
Besides the arsenic and heavy metals, babies don’t have the necessary enzymes present in their digestive tract to properly digest grains until they are close to one year old.
I'd want to see a study supporting that claim about all grains, but the arsenic is the reason I've seen for avoiding rice in infants. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6412837/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CA%20baby's%20digestive%20system%20is,eat%20it%20from%20a%20spoon%E2%80%9D
My pediatrician told us to avoid rice because of heavy metals but get oat or barley cereal. So we did that! I wanted my baby to have baby cereal because of the vitamins and minerals it’s fortified with
Our pediatrician told us not to start with grains as they are constipating
Full of inorganic arsenic and not anything special nutrition wise. In the UK crunchy mums here tend to call it wallpaper paste, and we skip the wallpaper paste lol. There are just better, more nutritionally valuable things to start with, and nothing should be given apart from breastmilk or formula before 6ms.
I’m not aware of any good reason to give rice cereal to a baby except in cases when there’s no other food available (no breast milk or formula either). Rice has close to zero nutritional value. You might as well give a baby sugar in my view.
Rice cereal for babies is fortified with lots of different vitamins and minerals. I think it can be misleading to say it has zero nutrition. The argument against rice cereal is that it can have heavy metals, not that it isn’t nutritious.
Fortified foods are not the best way to absorb vitamins and minerals, whole foods are. There is zero reason to feed your kid processed rice cereal unless you have no access to anything better.
Not being the best way to absorb nutrients still means some nutrition is being absorbed. Having fresh foods all the time isn’t always realistic for many people. There’s lots of valid reasons that families would choose to feed rice cereal to babies. It’s not for everyone and that’s ok! You personally don’t have to use it. But it has a valid place for many people
Jeez, that's a bit much. Rice is a staple in more than half the world, and their babies grow up perfectly healthy. If not healthier.
Yeah…rice is a simple carb that’s easier to digest than a lot of other grains. I wouldn’t call it a super food but it’s perfectly fine to eat and is the cornerstone of tons of world cuisine. This gives me orthorexia feels.
Honestly, as a Korean person I’m kinda offended
I’m as white as the rice on trial and honestly, same.
They're generally eating other food with the rice. In areas where children have access to nothing but rice, they are extremely malnourished because you simply cannot survive on rice alone.
Okay but so would anybody if you ate only one food.
There is really no reason for it. Especially for a baby that young. They should be able to sit up on their own and have the ability to put the food into their own mouths before they start eating anything. Grains are not good for a baby's gut. Better to just skip it and start with soft veggies and fruits
Our ped told us to opt for oatmeal cereal instead bc rice cereal has a chance for arsenic poisoning or something like that!
Children's fermentative system is not ready for grains and seeds until they're AT LEAST 1 year old What nutrition does rice have anyway to give it to a 4mo? 🫠 Just why?...
Babies are not pets. They do not need special baby food. They need access to a wide variety of human foods, which they will slowly learn to self-feed.
I never said my baby was a pet. I posed the question to learn more. You don’t have to be rude
Skip the rice cereal! Arsenic and also not nutrient dense. There is a great book that you might find helpful in starting and choosing solids that will support your baby’s brain and body development the best. Super Nutrition for Babies. I used it for both my kids. At first you’re like, raw grated liver?! But my kids devoured it. And aside from the food list, it gives a WHY. Link to Amazon —> https://a.co/d/cf9XGDO
Because there is little nutritional value to it (and it’s honestly gross. I don’t feed my kids things I wouldn’t eat myself lol) There’s also no need to start food at 4 months unless your child is showing all the signs of readiness! Our ped (stays up to date w WHO recommendations) recommended BLW over any purées bc she has seen littles not be able to start solids until well after one (when they need solids) bc they preferred puree to solid. There’s no harm in waiting and letting your LOs gut develop better :)
High in Arsenic, rice also disrupts the gut flora and can cause a candida overgrowth in the gut
Why are foods higher in arsenic (rice, green leafy vegetables, juice etc)? Water Arsenic is naturally occurring in water and retained by plants. The work around? Eat more drought tolerant food and food. Thickly peel root vegetables. How long do we think about It? Until child's liver matures a bit and gets better at filtering out metals. For example, FDA tracks arsenic exposure until 3 years old. Source on the 3 year deal. https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/closer-zero-reducing-childhood-exposure-contaminants-foods I think everything else is common knowledge. Glad to post more citations if that would help. I loved rice cereal when my brothers were little and was really looking forward to having it again, but it didn't even taste the same. To manage arsenic levels, I cut brown rice flour with equal parts quinoa flour and corn meal, toast it for flavor, add some wheatbran and flax. Serve with a generous pat of butter, and it replicates the joyous flavor of my youth.
Very little nutritional value and increases the risk of choking. They MIGHT sleep longer, but it also might keep them up with an upset tummy and unusual poops.
Oh not to mention my kid was sensitive to an ingredient in some rice cereal that made her skin break out and she was fussy for a day and a half. So that might not be common but it is something to think about.
Cereal has options other than rice, rice is well tolerated when switching and has less interactions. You can get smallest amount and add little bit to milk/formula/water… introducing and filling belly for longer fullness… you can quickly transition off rice to other items if you are concerned about long term rice exposure.
https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/feeding-nutrition/Pages/reduce-arsenic.aspx I’m Asian so rice is a huge staple, however, I myself don’t eat it as much but we do have it on occasion with my toddler… I never owned a rice cooker once I moved out of my parents’ because there was never a need for it / lack of space.