Some time ago, we shared the content of how to arrange complementary food for babies with cow's milk protein allergy, and some mothers came to ask "how to arrange complementary food for lactose intolerant babies?".
Today we will share some details that parents need to pay attention to when feeding their lactose intolerant baby.
1. If you suspect that the baby is lactose intolerant, go to the hospital for examination in time to determine whether the baby is lactose intolerant or milk protein allergy.
The most common thing we encounter in our work is that parents suspect that the baby is lactose intolerant, or according to the baby's eczema, diarrhea, constipation and other symptoms, after consulting friends, colleagues and even mother and baby store promoters, to determine that the baby is lactose intolerant. Then parents either choose to use lactase, or simply switch to lactose-free milk powder, a variety of special formulas.
When asked why they didn't go to the hospital for a test to confirm the diagnosis, the parents' reasons were also varied, some said that they could not find the relevant hospital, some said that the child was too guilty to have blood drawn, some said that the doctor said that the test was not accurate and unnecessary, and some said that the doctor said that the child was too young to be tested.
Whether the baby is lactose intolerant or not, parents can't be sure, just like taking medicine indiscriminately without knowing the cause. Anyway, you can't eat complementary food, and it doesn't hurt to eat, but the big deal is not to drink milk or spend more money to drink special milk powder. The addition of complementary food is even more likely to kill a thousand by mistake than to let go of one, and the progress is slow, and there is no big mistake in being careful. This can easily lead to a greatly increased risk of malnutrition in babies, and the progress of complementary food addition is often seriously behind.
Regarding the problems that may be caused by special formula milk powder, you can refer to the article we shared two days ago to remind parents that it is easy to ignore the particularity of special formula milk powder when their babies eat special milk powder, and the unreasonable addition of complementary food causes children to lag behind in weight development.
Why does special formula make babies "not grow meat"?
2. Parents should not have the illusion of "try it, what if the child is normal", long-term repeated diarrhea may cause gastrointestinal bleeding.
In our work, we often encounter situations where parents suspect that their baby is lactose intolerant, or suspect that their child has a food allergy. These parents are often anxious when their baby's diarrhea or suspected allergy symptoms are severe, and they will suspend complementary foods. When the baby feels better, start adding again. One of the most serious problems we encountered was secondary lactose intolerance due to the repeated attempts of parents to add complementary foods, and the baby's blood in the stool was more severe.
Therefore, for babies who are lactose intolerant and are in the stage of adding complementary food, parents can not simply consider adding lactase or changing to special formula, but need to pay more attention to their children's diet management and nutrition management, and personalized nutritional support to meet the individual needs of children.
3. If the baby has diarrhea, it is important to accurately determine the cause.
Lactose intolerance can easily cause diarrhea, but there are many factors that can cause diarrhea when babies add complementary foods:
(1) Rotavirus
Rotavirus is more common in children under 5 years old, especially infants and young children aged 6 months ~ 2 years. Babies in the oral desire period always like to put the objects they can get into their mouths to explore and feel, so they are easily infected.
(2) Flatulence
This is more common during the complementary food addition phase. If the baby's complementary food is relatively simple, the food eaten is more starch, less dietary fiber, or more sweet food, more fruits, less vegetables, starch and sugar ferment in the intestine to produce gas to cause flatulence, flatulence is easy to cause diarrhea.
If the baby farts frequently, it is easy to bring out loose stools or the poop is very sour when farting, which indicates that there is too much starch or sugar intake, and parents should pay attention to it and need to adjust the dietary structure.
(3) Fever or taking medication
When a baby has a fever, it can sometimes cause a disturbance of the intestinal flora, resulting in diarrhea. In addition, some babies will also have diarrhea when taking some antibiotics or heat-clearing Chinese medicine
(4) Eating unclean food
When the weather is hot, food left at room temperature for a long time is easy to breed bacteria, and sometimes parents do not pay attention to the separation of raw and cooked food or give their children unclean food, which can also cause diarrhea.
(5) When breastfeeding, the mother's diet is too greasy or consumes too much sugar
Although it is said that as long as the mother has a balanced diet, there is no need to avoid food during breastfeeding, but we often encounter some babies at work who are more sensitive, and the mother eats greasy, or consumes too much sugar, such as ordering takeout when there is no time to cook, eating vegetables and replacing them with a lot of fruits, eating some bread if you don't want to cook, eating too many carbohydrates and too few vegetables in steamed buns, etc. If the composition of breast milk fluctuates slightly, the baby will have flatulence and diarrhea.
In short, sometimes parents suspect that the baby is lactose intolerant, or the lactose intolerant baby has eaten lactase, after drinking milk, and after half a day of eating complementary food and diarrhea, parents may also think that it is caused by lactose intolerance. Therefore, if lactose intolerant babies have symptoms of diarrhea, parents need to carefully identify and find out the cause.
4. Don't be afraid if the baby has diarrhea, care and feed it correctly.
Lactose intolerant babies are prone to diarrhea if they don't pay attention to it, and parents are very anxious when they see their babies having diarrhea, and when they are anxious, they are easy to choose to restrict eating or even directly suspend complementary food to adjust.
In the process of adding complementary food, we have not advocated the arbitrary suspension of complementary food, even during the baby's illness, we still recommend that parents provide complementary food on time, and you can suspend new complementary food. Even if the baby has diarrhea, you can replace the meat, eggs, poultry and fish with mushrooms and tofu, instead of banning the complementary food.
Complementary food has a negative impact on the cultivation of baby's eating habits and the development and improvement of the digestive system.
Suspending complementary food and only letting the baby drink milk does have a good side for relieving diarrhea, but if the supplementary food is repeatedly suspended or the progress of supplementary food is added very slowly, the baby's digestive system develops and digestive enzyme metabolism is also easily affected.
Frequent suspension of complementary food is not conducive to the cultivation of baby's eating habits. Many mothers will find that the baby is very clingy after recovering from illness, and the complementary food is not eaten well, and it feels as if the baby needs to readjust for a period of time. The baby in the stage of adding complementary food is the critical period of transition from swallowing to chewing, and suspending the complementary food means that the baby does not need to chew when eating, because the milk only needs to suck and swallow. The longer the complementary food is paused, the more dependent your baby will be on sucking and swallowing. The mechanical digestion of food in the mouth relies on the cooperation of the lips, teeth and tongue to chew, and the chewing function is characterized by "use in and waste out". If you use it regularly, you will be fine, but if you don't chew for a long time, the chewing function will become weaker and weaker.
Originally, the baby was better at chewing, but after the supplementary food was suspended for a period of time, the parents felt that the child had recovered almost, and then provided the baby with food before diarrhea, sometimes it was found that the child did not like to eat, ate and vomited, and the complementary food was eaten worse than before, the reason is that the suspension of the complementary food for too long, the child's chewing ability declined.
In addition, after the baby's diarrhea, parents generally think that the child needs to eat soft and easy to digest food, most of which provide rice noodles, soup porridge, noodles and other foods that do not need to be chewed at all, which further strengthens the child's swallowing function.
On the other hand, the baby has diarrhea, and the parents feel that the baby needs to eat some "soft" food, so they only give porridge or noodles, and the intake of vegetables is often seriously insufficient. However, the formation of feces and the recovery of intestinal flora are inseparable from dietary fiber. Babies only consume carbohydrates and have no dietary fiber intake, and diarrhea or poop is not formed and is easy to last for a long time.
Therefore, if the baby has diarrhea due to lactose intolerance, parents should take proper care and be cautious to use the Internet or the so-called "home remedies" to avoid the aggravation of the child's diarrhea or the prolongation of the recovery period.
The baby we served this time was due to the fact that the parents did not deal with it correctly, and overly optimistically estimated the state of the child's recovery after diarrhea, and the supplementary food provided by the child after diarrhea increased the child's digestive burden, so the child just recovered a little bit and the state became worse, and finally recovered a little bit and the parents did not pay attention to letting the child return to the original shape.
5. To feed lactose intolerant babies, parents need to pay more time, energy and patience.
If it is judged that the baby's complementary food is lagging behind, it is important for parents to accept this reality, accept the reality, and then consider how to improve. It is especially important not to blindly pursue the progress and speed of complementary food addition.
At present, almost all complementary food addition plans on the Internet only have one dimension of month age, and lack the dimension of baby's swallowing-chewing progress. As a result, even if it is the same meal of complementary food, due to the different cooking habits and cooking levels of parents, the supplementary food produced is different in dryness and thickness. Babies in the complementary food addition stage are very sensitive to the dryness of the food and the thickness of the food particles, and the details of feeding in each family are different, which causes the progress of the complementary food to be added quickly and slowly.
Parents who are interested in this can take a look at the following article, a dish of broccoli egg yolk rice noodles, 4 different methods affect the characteristics of the finished product.
Is it cooked or ground first to make complementary food?
Lactose intolerance and allergic babies are very prone to the problem of falling behind in the progress of complementary food, that is, the baby may be 1 year old, but in fact, they can't eat complementary food suitable for 1-year-old children, and can only eat food for 10-month-old or even 7-month-old babies. If parents are unaware of this and continue to give food beyond their ability to eat, the baby may not be able to eat, chew, swallow or refuse to eat complementary foods, or eat too much food beyond the ability to digest and make diarrhea worse or cause other digestive problems.
When parents encounter such problems, they should be aware of the baby's individual needs, do not compare with other normal children, make less horizontal comparisons, pay attention to the present, and pay attention to the baby's current state is very important. Only when parents are not anxious can they bring more positive help to their babies when feeding.
If it has been determined that your baby is lactose intolerant, how to manage your baby's complementary food supplements?
First of all, it is recommended that parents look at whether the baby's growth and development curve is within the normal range. If it is normal, but if there is a problem of growth delay, you need to do a dietary review to find out the cause, and make targeted adjustments to improve it as soon as possible.
Lactose intolerance is indeed a problem, but we must look at it comprehensively and holistically from the perspective of children's growth and development, rather than staring at lactose intolerance and wondering what children should do. As long as your child is growing and developing normally, there is no need to be overly anxious.
Secondly, compare the following 7~24-month-old infant balanced diet pagoda to see whether the daily diet structure is reasonable and whether the collocation is balanced
Milk is only a source and supplement of children's nutrition, and as children grow older, complementary foods will gradually replace milk as the basis of children's nutrition and calories. Therefore, parents should pay more attention to the quality of complementary food.
The problem we often encounter in our work is that lactose intolerant babies generally lag behind in the addition of complementary foods. The main performance is in:
1. There are few types of ingredients, but they are not abundant.
Because the child often has diarrhea, parents dare not add it and dare not give it to their children. The types of ingredients that children can eat are extremely limited, and many mushrooms, vegetables rich in dietary fiber, animal offal, etc., parents think that they are "hard" and "not easy to digest", and will not give them to their babies.
The variety of ingredients is small, and the nutrition is a common problem.
2. Slow swallowing-chewing transition
The baby has diarrhea and is sick, and parents are worried about aggravation, so they will choose soft and easy to digest food. Easy to digest means that most of the food is low-density porridge, noodles, soup, and rice noodles. Your baby doesn't need much chewing when he eats these foods, just swallow, or bite off and swallow. Coupled with the abundance of soup, the food can be easily "washed down". Children who eat such food for a long time will not be able to exercise their chewing function, and they will be tired and unwilling to eat steamed buns, steamed cakes, cakes, rice, etc., which need to be fully chewed to stimulate saliva secretion to complete the digestion in the mouth.
But children can't just eat porridge, noodles and rice noodles forever, and when parents think that their children are old enough to eat rice, pancakes and steamed buns, they will find that their babies do not accept these foods at all.
3. It is more likely to have problems such as picky eating and partial eating caused by taste deviation
Baby lactose intolerance, parents will subconsciously have the idea of "the baby is very weak" and "eat more carefully", so when the baby adds complementary food, pay more attention to the child's "eating result", that is, how much to eat, ignoring the "eating process". It is easier for parents to coax and tease the baby to eat more food, or to the extent that the parent thinks it is "full".
In addition, if the baby does not eat well, parents may give milk after meals, eat fruits or snacks to make the baby full, so that the child is more dependent on milk and fruits, and more reluctant to eat complementary food. And then let parents fall into a vicious circle of what the baby likes to eat and do, and what can be eaten.
If the baby does have the problems I summarized above, adjust and improve it as soon as possible.
Again, pay attention to whether your child's daily caloric intake is met.
Babies of different ages have different basal metabolism, the older they are, the higher their basal metabolism, coupled with gross motor development, the child's exercise ability increases with age. It is especially important to provide your baby with adequate calories and nutrients through diet. If parents give their children special milk powder, they need to pay more attention to the total calorie intake.
Source of calories = milk + complementary food + fruit + snacks + drinks, parents can calculate the approximate value.
Finally, according to the actual situation of the child, the choice is to take lactase or lactose-free milk powder.
If your child is determined to be lactose intolerant, you can usually choose to take lactase or lactose-free milk powder.
If the baby is more than a year old, some parents may consider choosing Shuhua Milk, which is more convenient to drink. But even if the baby is more than a year old, it is normal to drink milk, but it is still in the stage of adding complementary food. It should be noted that soothing milk uses lactase as an additive in milk to decompose the only disaccharide, lactose, into a molecule of galactose and a molecule of glucose. Since the sweetness of galactose is 60% of sucrose and 74% of glucose, both of which are much higher than the 16% sweetness of lactose, Shuhua milk will feel sweeter to drink.
Foods that are too sweet are very unfriendly to babies at this stage and have a great impact on children's sense of taste. Therefore, it is not advisable to give your child soothing milk too early.
It is not terrible for babies to have lactose intolerance, as long as parents consider and analyze the whole from the perspective of children's growth and development, and try to provide personalized nutritional support to meet their children's needs.
I am Wan Dad, a nutritionist and nursery, I like to share the knowledge of baby food production and feeding, and the baby food for different ages has been filmed into videos and graphics, which are included in my public account "Wan Dad Parenting", including staple food, soup, baking, food therapy and a meal matching, etc., pay attention to me, no longer worry about what the baby eats!