Diet Culture and Feeding Babies

As any parent can tell you, there’s a lot of pressure to do things just “right.” The unrealistic expectations around parenting are perhaps most evident when it comes to feeding your child. This blog post looks at diet culture and feeding babies, and the harm it does to new parents.

Hi all! Bringing my associate RD Kate back in for another awesome post on intuitive eating, diet culture and parenting. As a new mom, I am so grateful for the wealth of personal and professional knowledge she brings to this area.

It’s Kate, back with more baby-related content. My last post focused on pregnancy and intuitive eating. This time we are talking about the challenge of feeding babies, and how diet culture can make it feel impossible sometimes.

This is not a “how to feed your baby” post. If anything, I hope this post helps clear away some of the noise , because there’s already enough people out there telling you what or what not to do. As a dietitian my area of expertise doesn’t include babies. However, my training as a non-diet dietitian drew my attention to something I found pretty alarming – the invasion of diet culture in feeding babies. So let’s talk about that.

What is diet culture?

As dietitian Christy Harrison defines it, diet culture is a system of beliefs that worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, and oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of “health.” Diet culture hyper-focuses on elevating some foods as “good” and other foods as “bad”. It moralizes personal decisions around food, and normalizes spending large amounts of brain energy on things like planning perfect meals meals and exercise routines, counting calories or macros, obsessing over how to achieve thinness or a “perfect” body. Because of diet culture, feeling shame about one’s body or food choices has become common and “normal,” instead of being a marker of disordered eating.

What does diet culture have to do with feeding babies?

Because babies aren’t exercising or trying to obtain an unrealistic body type, you may think the two can’t be related. Babies can’t count calories or even choose what they are fed. Thank goodness, right?

While babies can’t engage in diet culture themselves, diet culture can (and does!) find its way into parents mindset about feeding their baby. Like the sly devil it is, diet culture can find a way to sink it’s claws into pretty much anything.

Here’s some ways diet culture shows up in feeding babies:

Hyper focus on what’s good or bad to feed a baby, for example formula vs breast milk, purees vs hand-held solids.
Being labeled as a good or bad parent depending on how you choose to feed your baby.
Constantly questioning your decisions around feeding to the point of feeling intense anxiety and doubting your abilities to parent.
Feeling an immense amount of shame when the way you feed your baby doesn’t line up with what’s viewed as “best” by others.

The challenges of finding helpful information about feeding babies

As a new mom, everything about babies felt left totally out of my scope of knowledge. Like many new parents, I found myself googling a lot! With that, I had to wade through a sea of opinion-based information. When it comes to baby-related topics, like sleep, development, feeding, and growth, you can easily find thousands of influencers touting expertise, when in reality their “expertise” rarely goes beyond their lived experience. Now, I will never discount someone’s lived experience, but I will wave a red flag when someone tries to apply it to everyone. When someone else’s lived experience doesn’t line up with yours, or their authoritative advice doesn’t fit with your lifestyle, it can really have you doubting your own experience.

Reading these opinions as a non-diet dietitian, I noticed just how much thoughts around feeding babies are reflective of diet culture. It puts even more pressure on finding the “right” way to feed your child, and creates a ton of fear around doing the “wrong” thing. Diet culture clouds your ability to use your own judgement and intuition in knowing what is best for your little one.

Formula vs. Breastfeeding

The first decision parents make about feeding their baby is figuring out if breastfeeding or formula feeding works best for them. What should be a personal family decision is made under the shadow of intense public opinion on what’s superior. I had my baby amid the formula shortage and was astounded to see how many men suddenly became experts in breastfeeding! I read forums of moms ignoring their mental health and needs to try to breastfeed out of fear of formula, despite plenty of evidence that formula is a totally suitable option for a baby. The notion that “breast is best” is just not true for everyone and can be very harmful. Many things can make formula the better choice - like the need for life-saving medications, poor supply, latch issues, work schedules that don’t allow for regular pumping, lack of support, and personal preference. Neglecting to consider someone’s personal experience and assign morality to a feeding choice is a perfect example of diet culture at work.

Moving on to solids:

Once it comes time to introduce solids, the opinions on how to feed a baby get even louder. The noise can make trying to feed your baby feel paralyzing, not knowing where or when to start!

Social media exacerbates perfectionism, including around feeding your baby. You can’t just feed your baby food, but you also need to feed your baby aesthetically pleasing food too. Even before I was a mom, I loved seeing the adorable plates of food influencer moms would put together for their babies and share on social media. Usually these plates displayed brightly colored foods, a wide variety of food, and food cut in adorable shapes. When I learned I was having a baby, I felt excited about future meals I’d make. What I didn't consider were the things that would complicate feeding my baby - like my own sleep deprivation and busy work schedule as well as a baby whose interest in food often waxed and waned. Trying to keep up with the idyllic pictures of baby food plates was more challenging than I anticipated! I caught myself getting down on myself at times when in reality I was doing just fine.

Baby Led Weaning vs Purees

You may be familiar with the most common debate around feeding babies: to start with purees or to start immediately with finger foods (a method called Baby Led Weaning). Being an avid “healthy lifestyle” blog reader of the early 2010s, I was well indoctrinated on the pros of baby led weaning. In fact, as a young adult never mothering a child, I was convinced baby led weaning was the superior way to feed a baby and of course I would feed any future children in that way. When I had my baby I was still convinced this is the method I’d take.

As she started to eat more foods, I remember a moment I had where I felt guilty for a buying an applesauce pouch for convenience. I thought, would using a pouch stunt my baby’s ability to feed herself? This feeling of guilt quickly left my body as I called out the preposterous thought. Time has shown me, puree pouches are an excellent portable snack!

Now I realize how silly it is to make it seem like an either / or scenario. My baby gets a combination of pureed and solids and seems to take well to both, but I have friends whose babies prefer the pureed foods and that’s okay too.

When considering the debate of pureed vs Baby Led Weaning, science doesn’t really support one over the other. The science is evolving. If you lined up 5 pediatricians, they might have a different take on how to approach feeding a baby. If you search “baby led weaning” on PubMed, the first five articles tell you more research is needed. It’s good to be aware that often a proponent for one side will often only share the evidence for their side rather providing an unbiased take.

The Bottom Line

I’m not far into motherhood at all - just 10 months thus far. However, I’ve already learned that the stress of trying to do things *just right* has the power to taint everything and take a lot of the joy out of parenting. Understandably, there is a lot of feelings of pressure when it comes to feeding a baby- 100% of the responsibility is on you. While diet culture wants you to believe there is one right way and only with that way can you avoid long lasting damage, babies are more resilient than that. You can take many approaches and have a happy and healthy baby. Ask your adult friends how they were fed, and you will find several different answers.

While I still need to outsource for information from time to time, there are some things I look for when finding a source. If they use extreme language and hail one way as THE way, I am out. If they make sugar the devil and organic the savior, I am out. In general parent forums or Facebook groups are not somewhere I try to spend a lot of time. I look for balanced information the best I can, such as information that emphasizes baby safety and makes me feel like I’ve learned something rather than making me doubt myself.

I have found a lot of joy in finding my baby’s favorite foods and providing them to her. She loves raspberries, spaghetti, Bambas from Trader Joe’s, hummus, and mandarin oranges the most right now. It is so much fun to see her eat these things with gusto. I’m not stressing that she doesn’t always eat a vegetable every day. I am choosing to trust the process that as she grows, so will her palette.

Feeling overwhelmed managing feeding yourself and a little one? We work with clients virtually and out of our Columbia, SC office. Learn more about our practice philosophy, and reach out if you’re interested in working together.