"baby" news and stories

This week, the Wall Street Journal reviewed several companies that make and sell organic baby foods. Unlike Tot Pots, all four companies sell their products online, which means that they're available to anyone with a credit card and a mailbox. Hopefully, you'll have a baby, too, but that's not really a prerequisite to purchasing baby food.

Evie's Organic Edibles uses no preservatives, salt or sugar in their well-flavored foods. The NY-based company offers in-home cooking, delivery and classes, too. Plum Organics were described as "good enough for a grown up" - especially some of their dessert options. Homemade Baby is based in Southern California, has food prepared by a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef and offers an on-site baby food tasting room for picky eaters, in addition to mail-order. Little Potatoes Baby Food is colorful from fresh veggies straight from the farm and offers different textures for different age groups.

Though the South Beach, Florida store in question was closed for renovations this past Sunday, some mothers gathered at a Starbucks and held a "nurse-in" to protest the expulsion of a woman named Nicole Coombs from the store. Coombs claims that she was asked to leave for breast-feeding her 4-month old son. The Starbucks manager, however, maintains that Coombs was asked to leave for changing her baby's diaper on one of the tables in the cafe.

Coombs states that the store manager asked her to leave while she was breastfeeding. She said she would leave as soon as she was done, because she was so outraged that she did not want to remain in the store. Then, according to Coombs, she proceeded to change her baby's diaper. She does not deny that she changed the baby on the table where people ordinarily eat. Now, the store manager says that he did not say anything to Coombs about breast feeding, which is perfectly acceptable in the store. He contends that he approached her as she changed her baby on the table and asked her to stop. When she refused, she was asked to leave.

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Scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Pennsylvania claim to have found periods in the first seven months of life in which taste preferences are developed. If it is true, it might mean that the foods that the mother eats during pregnancy will influence what foods the child prefers later in life. It also means that, since the taste of a mother's milk can vary according to her diet, that the foods a mother eats while breast feeding could also have a long-term impact on a child.

I have a hard time believing this, aside from the bit about finding flavor variation in mother's milk. As anyone with a sibling (or with multiple children) will note, most kids have different eating preferences. Most mothers do not radically change their diet from one pregnancy to another. I think that children develop tastes depending on what they are exposed to and how they are introduced to it, not based on some residual "memory" from infancy.

ABC News also notes that "the data could be used to influence how baby formula is designed, so infants are exposed to tastes that will help them enjoy healthy foods later in life." Attempting to program children, in infancy, to pick spinach over sugar? Excuse me while I laugh at how ridiculous that sounds. Just because a child was given spinach flavored formula does not change the fact that they will probably like ice cream the first time they try it.

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When babies eat or drink, it's from a bottle, but does it always have to be so boring? Don't kids deserve a little fashion and fun with their formula?

This one, designed like a cow, complete with an udder, is an Italian product made of polycarbonate with a silicone nipple. It's so cute I'd fill it with water and drink from it myself.

Okay, I wouldn't go that far. But I might be willing to babysit my niece more often.

Available at Spakability.

Stonyfield Farms is looking to make yogurt even healthier. In Canada, their Organic YoBaby Plus Fruit & Cereal Yogurt, made for infants and toddlers, is now fortified with MEG-3 brand omega-3, giving it the same heart-healthy fatty acids that are found in foods like fish. Omega-3 is also found in breast milk in the same concentration that Stonyfield is using in its yogurt; it was likely the inspiration for the idea to add MEG-3 to the product in the first place, as soft yogurts are considered to be a good "transition" to solid foods.

Yogurt isn't the only food to recently gain the benefits of omega-3s. Some research is being done with pork and omega-3s. The question is whether the infusion of the fatty acid into other foods will be able to reproduce all the health benefits of the naturally occurring acids in fish.

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