Purchased baby jars: advantages and disadvantages
If you want to expand your baby’s diet with complementary food, you may be wondering whether purchased jars are a good solution or whether you should cook the porridges yourself. We will tell you what advantages and disadvantages jars have compared to home-cooked porridges and give you tips on what you should pay attention to when buying the glasses.
Baby jars: yes or no?
If you decide to feed your baby baby jars, you can usually do so without hesitation. Because industrially produced baby food is subject to strict controls and therefore contains nothing that could be harmful to your baby. As long as you make your baby’s menu healthy and diverse according to his age, you can therefore fall back on glasses without hesitation. A good orientation of what your baby should eat at what age can give you ourbaby nutrition plan, which was developed on the basis of the recommendations of the Research Institute for Child Nutrition in Dortmund (FKE).
Advantages of glasses
The decisive advantages of glasses include:
- The directives on monitoring the production and control of the finished product are much stricter for industrially produced baby food than for other foods. This means that thequality standards for finished baby products are at the highest possible level. So you can be sure that jars do not contain any harmful and inadmissible additives. However, the staple foods available on the market also meet these safety criteria, so you can achieve a similar result when cooking porridges yourself.
- The composition of theingredients is age-appropriateto the needs of the babies and provides your offspring with all the nutrients they need.
- Jars help you save time, as shopping takes much less time than self-preparation.
- Jars are a quick andconvenient solution on the go, as they are already packed and portioned.
Disadvantages of jars
However, there are also some points of criticism that slightly downgrade the glasses in their overall rating. However, if you are aware of this and react accordingly, you can usually use jars without hesitation.
- Home-cooked complementary foods are usually muchcheaperthan ready-made glasses.
- Some jars deviate a little from expert recommendations in terms of the amount of nutrients. For example, many jars contain too little fat. In this case, it is important to supplement meals accordingly or choose another product. Because both a deficiency and an abundance of nutrients can have a negative effect on your baby’s health in the long run.
- In self-prepared porridges you can decide whether you wantto do without non-essential additives, such as sugar, salt and spices.
Salt in baby jars
Salt or broth is added to some glasses, as they lose some of their taste due to the necessary preservation. However, the legally established limits for salt in porridge are not exceeded.
Which glass is best?
The answer to the question of which baby jar is most suitable for your baby and which product you should choose is not related to the manufacturer. It is generally recommended to choose jars whose ingredients and composition most resemble home-cooked porridges. The exact recommendations for the composition of the individual porridges can be found in our article “How much complementary food does your baby eat?”. In order to prevent possible deficiencies, you should therefore look closely at the list of ingredients and ingredients of the jars and choose the products that best correspond to the composition for home-cooked porridges.
Of course, this is not always fully possible and controllable. Some information, such as the amount of fat, can usually be found on the label and possibly supplemented accordingly, for example a teaspoon of rapeseed oil. However, the main ingredients of finished porridges are usually named without exact quantities. Here, however, the order of the listed ingredients can be an orientation. Because the list of ingredients is always ordered according to the quantity percentage. This means that the more of a particular ingredient is contained in a jar, the further forward it is on the list of ingredients. So you can at least approximately determine whether the composition of a glass corresponds to the usual recommendations.