So it turns out that I have a VERY sensitive and allergic baby on my hands. She started out getting hives a couple of months ago, and I didn't know why. I thought maybe it was something I was putting on her, and it was, partly (I'll have to write another post about that later) -- but what I didn't realize was that it was also what I was putting IN me, and was coming into her, through my breast milk. In addition to a lot of contact allergies, she also has food allergies (she got that from her mother, I'm afraid...).
Some hives on my girl's cheek from another day:
I've been gradually working on figuring out this tiny girl's MANY allergies... So far I know for sure she is allergic to dairy/eggs, as well as fragrances/chemicals/dyes. Lots of other things are still unknown because I'm almost never 100% certain of the cause of her reactions (hard to isolate just one variable in life!). Yesterday I got a new mattress for my bed, and after laying my baby down on it to sleep, I went in to check on her after a while and found her all covered in bright red hives. There must have been some sort of chemical in the new mattress materials that she was reacting to. I quickly removed her and put some of my various treatments on her skin, and we slept on the couch last night instead of in the bedroom and I'm letting the mattress air out for a while before we attempt sleeping on it again.
SO - to get to what this post is REALLY about - My baby has gotten to the stage where she wants to eat food all of the sudden. I've just been nursing her until now, but last week she started reaching and crying for food whenever I was eating something myself. So I started trying to give her some different things. However, it seemed she has an allergic reaction to EVERYTHING... Except, that is, sometimes. It was strange because I noticed one time, I fed her some banana while we were out somewhere and since I didn't have a fork or dish with me I just chewed up a piece and gave it to her. She seemed fine afterwards, and I was really happy that she seemed okay with banana! But then later another day, since she had seemed fine with the banana, I mashed some up for her at home in a bowl and fed it to her with a spoon. Soon after her head started getting all itchy and she started scratching and turning red behind her ears/around her neck. Was it the banana? Why was it bothering her today and not that other day? Then on another occasion, I fed her organic rice cereal made for babies (the kind you just mix with water). A similar itchy reaction happened soon after. But yet another day I was eating a burrito, and I chewed up some rice and fed it to her, and no reaction. I have started to notice a pattern and wondered if perhaps chewing my baby's food for her is making it easier for her to digest, and somehow helps her little immune system not to go all crazy as if it just got attacked by some chemical warfare... We do know that saliva has all sorts of enzymes and stuff that helps begin the digestion process before it even hits the stomach - and since babies can't chew, their food doesn't have the chance to get mixed around thoroughly with their saliva before being sent down to their tummies. I started to think about humanity and how really only recently in human history has it become practical to NOT chew your babies food... I mean, blenders and countertop grinders and food processors and canned pureed baby foods on the shelves in grocery stores have been around for a very short time on earth, relatively speaking. So chewing a baby's food may be an important part of how we have developed as a species; it might actually be an even more vital process/phase of life than I had ever imagined (or in actuality a process that I had ever even thought about at all until now).
I decided to do a little research and found some articles, even some studies have been done (but not a lot), about the potential benefits of pre-chewing your baby's food. Here is a link to one I found very interesting/helpful: https://www.livescience.com/19435-pre-chew-baby-food.html
In fact, I think I'll just paste the text of the entire article here at the end of my post, just in case for some reason the link should ever break.
So -- I think I won't worry about the "weirdness" of chewing my baby's anymore, and I will just keep chewing for her for a while... Maybe what's actually weird, is how in "developed" countries we have stopped chewing for our babies and started feeding them from jars instead.... What do you think? I mean, obviously if you have a sore throat or some disease festering in your mouth then you probably want to refrain from the practice until you're better so you don't infect them, but if you're healthy - it seems very natural to me. And what's even more compelling in my case -- is that I think it might be actually helping my baby with her allergies! That's definitely worth being a little unconventional for.
Above-referenced article:
Should You Pre-Chew Your Baby's Food?
By Natalie Wolchover | April 2, 2012 04:19pm ET
Should You Pre-Chew Your Baby's Food?
Pre-chewing your baby's food can boost his or her immune system.
The actress Alicia Silverstone got a lot of grief last week after posting a video to her blog in which she is shown "pre-chewing" her baby's food, and offering it to him straight from her mouth. The "Clueless" star's 10-month-old son, Bear, appears to enjoy being fed like a baby bird. "He literally crawls across the room to attack my mouth if I'm eating," Silverstone blogged.
While most people who commented on the video were quick to voice their disgust and vilify the ill-considered whims of celebrity parents, science suggests that "pre-mastication," or the pre-chewing of adult food for infants, is actually a traditional and healthy feeding method. Standard practice among our blender-lacking ancestors, pre-chewing is still the norm in many non-Western cultures. The act exposes infants to their mothers' saliva, giving them an immune system boost that they can't get from the sterile, pulverized baby food bought in stores.
The benefits of pre-chewing have only recently been investigated, but they appear to parallel those of breast-feeding.
Babies start requiring non-milk food in their diets at six months old, but they don't develop the molars they need to chew most foods until age 18 to 24 months. According to research led by Gretel Pelto, an anthropologist at Cornell University, pre-mastication was the solution to feeding infants during this interim period for most of human history, and remains the method used in many cultures today. Rather than being unhygienic, Pelto and many other scientists think the feeding method carries on the immune-system-building process that begins with breastfeeding. By exposing infants to traces of disease pathogens present in a mother's saliva, it gears up their production of antibodies, teaching their immune systems how to deal with those same pathogens later. [Could Humans Live Without Bacteria?]
It may also prevent the onset of autoimmune diseases, such as asthma, that are very common in industrialized societies. These conditions arise when one's immune system mistakenly attacks one's own cells, and such ailments have been strongly linked to underexposure to diseases during childhood. "The epidemiological evidence [shows there are] increases in asthma and various allergic conditions in children and adults whose environments had significantly reduced pathogen exposure in early life," Pelto told Life's Little Mysteries.
The most common argument against pre-mastication is that infants occasionally catch infectious diseases from the saliva itself. For example, women with HIV are advised against pre-chewing their babies' food. However, research shows that disease transmission through pre-mastication is far less common than was previously assumed, because natural antibodies in saliva significantly reduce the infectiousness of the disease pathogens present there. Research by the immunologist Samuel Baron of the University of Texas Medical Branch has demonstrated that the risk of HIV transmission via saliva is actually very low — lower than the risk of transmission via breast milk.
Breast-feeding was outmoded in the 1950s, and has since seen a renaissance. Silverstone may simply be ahead of the curve regarding pre-mastication. "The evidence for breast milk is overwhelming," Pelto said. We think the story is identical for both breastfeeding and pre-mastication — they save lives by ensuring good nutrition and good development of the immune system. The evidence for pre-mastication has yet to be completed, but the logic is clear and the epidemiological evidence supports it."
Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.
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