Solid Food Tips and Information

Determining Whether a Food Is a Pass or Fail

With a Gerdling, this is more than just a matter of if baby “likes” or “dislikes” a food.  It would be great if we could feed our kids everything they enjoyed tasting, but unfortunately that’s not the way it works for them.  Instead, our feeding vocabulary consists of words like “safe,” “pass,” “tolerated,” and “failed.”  

The first and most important thing is to know your symptoms, even the mild ones.  Some are more obvious than others, such as screaming, vomiting, and diarrhea.  However, constipation, hiccups, short naps, crankiness or bad sleep are precursors of baby being in lots of pain and crying.  The earlier you can catch a fail, the faster and easier Baby’s recovery will be. 

A food that a child obviously does react to needs to be eliminated. This whole oral exposure therapy (continuing to give the food in the hopes that a reaction will pass) doesn’t work. You can’t desensitize, especially not in an uncontrolled manner by adding it in random form and quantity.  

The idea of the body “getting used” to reactive foods is called OIT, Oral Immune Therapy. It intends to expose to a food trigger that a patient has proven allergic to already (either by testing or previous reactions). It’s similar to shot therapy. In its original version it was meant to happen in a doctor’s office each time, with absolute controlled quantities and frequency under the supervision of the provider. It is no longer recommended since all the Eosinophilic Gastrointestinal Disorders came up. And since it never was a good idea to do this therapy as DIY project at home to begin with, the idea does become frightening when you think of the possibility the child has EoE or another EGID already (which never can be fully ruled out in a child with food allergies), so medical providers usually are aware the risk of tissue damage, high eosinophil count and further complications is way too high.  That could even be going on for months undetected anywhere in GI tract, so OIT is not a therapy recommended or used for food allergies much anymore.  

Gerdlings need to be given the benefit of the doubt when it appears they’re not tolerating a food (reflux increases, poop has mucus or gets firmer, sleep issues develop, etc.).  Call the food a fail and give baby a gut rest as opposed to assuming those changes are normal/to be expected when solids are first added, and continuing with trialing more solids. Remember, you can always go back and re-trial a food later if you weren’t totally sure it was a fail.  On the other hand, if you assume it’s a pass and start adding new foods on top, that may get you further and further from true baseline. Baby’s “bucket” will continue filling.  It’s not the symptoms themselves that cause the allergy/intolerance “bucket” to fill.  Rather, the problem foods are filling the “bucket,” and the symptoms are the indications or manifestations of that. 

This is what often results in severe reactions developing weeks to months after food has been added making it extremely confusing because you don’t know which food has built up and is now causing the “bucket” to overflow. You won’t know if it’s one food or multiple. This is how reflux gets way out of control once babes get older and begin eating; it’s also often when you see newer symptoms begin to arise–Problems with sleep for example or even ear infections or sinus infections (things brushed off as “normal” for this age, but usually have a root cause).

Anke T. writes: When they don’t sleep at night it’s an indicator they have foods in their diet that are not tolerated and this does give flatulence, stomach pain, but also reflux at a point. It’s a vicious cycle. If a food obviously is not tolerated (sleep alone can show that) there is no sense in “pushing through.”  There is no logic behind it. A food will not be tolerated better by more frequent and increase in exposure. A food not tolerated needs to be cut out for quite some time, and can be trialed months down the road again, when the issues are controlled and the child has reached baseline in regards to no symptoms.

Brittney Z. writes: In a month, your little symptoms here and there might become consistent problems as time goes on (snowball effect).  The continual exposure to something that isn’t 100% appropriate builds & builds. My daughter had this happen just before her 2nd bday. We were what we thought was corn free/light. Alimentum RTF & reading labels for obvious corn (corn syrup, corn starch, etc) but not so much for corn derivatives. Her poop got more formed & firm but it was daily & what we saw as her baseline (just harder & patty like). We went with the “she’s pooping daily so it’s probably ok”. Within several months of this & adding about 35+ foods (some trialed properly but some not so much) I noticed she began waking some at night, she would gulp & slightly arch but I really didn’t see any pain. I thought she was doing it for attention. Then she started saying “hot” when offered food. Still I missed it. 2 months before her bday she ate a bunch of foods ay my parents’ house that she shouldn’t have. Dairy etc. This led to diarrhea & then vomiting that lasted 2 weeks. We had to back way off solids because we had no idea which food was the issue. It wasn’t just what she had at my folks. It was something that caused her “bucket” so to speak to overflow (resulting in the reaction we saw). By backing off solids and allowing for a gut rest & only offering a few foods we KNEW were safe (because we had trialed them properly), this allowed her bucket to empty of those proteins & is what allowed us to get back to her Alimentum baseline. But it took more than a month for that to happen & once at baseline we worked to add back solids… In doing so we learned that rice, a food we initially called “safe”, actually was not being tolerated. This wasn’t surprising considering corn was already an issue & we later determined wheat wasn’t a great fit. So it was like “grains” in general were problematic for her.