By Elena Voropay

After your baby's birth, you are often puzzled how to treat your baby in the best possible way for your child to grow healthy and happy. The choice of products offered for the baby is overwhelming, and making a decision on what to buy may even be harder than raising the child! Your selection should not be based on a brand or a price tag, but what the actual benefit of its functions. Before you buy another baby food jar, or another cereal box, find out what's inside.

Nourishment From Nature

At 4-6 months of age, babies open a whole new world of tastes and textures and are ready to start mouthing and chewing "solid" food. This is the golden period when you can start introducing new products. It is best to choose the most natural foods as your baby will develop love for the flavours and will actually prefer them in the future.

It is true that commercial baby food is convenient, but the price tag for convenience may be too high – the health of your rapidly growing shiny star. When you buy commercial processed foods, as natural as they may seem, they are often diluted with water and starchy fillers such as tapioca, rice flour and modified corn starch. Even the companies producing organic baby food use fillers.

What's more, most baby foods have added water, sugars, salt, and may contain trace amounts of chemicals, including pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. These are not essential or beneficial to your baby’s diet.

Processed foods lose nutrients and livelihood of the natural ingredients put in them due to exposure to light, heat, and long storage time. A little jar of vegetable puree with a 2-year shelf life does not compare to the smell, taste, color and vitality offered by garden-fresh nature's gifts that have been steamed and mashed and served from your own kitchen.

Try avoid the introduction of these foods until your child is much older and nourish your offspring with homemade baby food that is pure and wholesome. The bright side of preparing baby food at home is that you can to add herbs, combine flavors, and easily introduce new textures, making your baby’s mealtime a pleasurable, gourmet experience. Maybe cooking will become your new hobby!