Super Nutrition for Babies (Review and Giveaway)

Be sure and check out our current GIVEAWAY while you're here.

"A wonderful guide for getting babies off to the right start, and helping them enjoy the gift of health for life." 

-Sally Fallon Morell (President, Weston A. Price Foundation)

As anyone who has ever visited the “parenting” section of their library knows, there a lots of books on raising babies. Some helpful, some not-so-much, some full of conflicting advice, outdated “science”, or misguided judgements. Pick any one topic of interest for parents (e.g. vaccines, potty-training, sleep training, ad infinitum, etc....) and you have fifty books. The topic of first foods is no different. There are tons of books on feeding babies.

See it here.

But Super Nutrition for Babies: The Right Way to Feed Your Baby for Optimal Health is different.

This book is guided by the understanding that traditional cultures from around the world understood the keys to optimal health.

Parents today face new challenges in raising their children than previous generations. While we are not plagued with the acute illnesses of the past, we have a whole new set of concerns—chronic conditions such as autism, allergies, asthma, ADD, depression, IBS, Celiac disease, obesity, tooth decay, and cancer to name a few.

In Super Nutrition for Babies, Katherine Erlich, M.D. And Kelly Genzlinger, C.N.C., C.M.T.A., offer their solution to these modern problems using traditional wisdom and nutritional knowledge: what they call “Super Nutrition”.

What is Super Nutrition?

In Chapter 1 of Super Nutrition for Babies, Erlich and Genzlinger outline what they call the "Four Pillars of Super Nutrition". Foods with super nutrition provide the following:

• Digestibility: facilitate digestion and support intestinal health.
• Purity: reduce toxic exposure and improve detoxification capabilities
• Immune Boosting: strengthen and support immunity.
• Nutrient Worth: provide optimally nourishing foods.

These four categories are based on the work of Dr. Weston A. Price who traveled for nearly ten years to different indigenous cultures during the early 1900s and identified the similarities between their diets to understand how they could eat so differently from each other, but all have utter superb health.

This book reveals their secrets so you can share them with your baby.

The Four Food Categories

After outlining their understanding of super nutrition, Erlich and Genzlinger go on to outline four different categories that food can be divided into on the basis of how they help or hinder a child to grow to their optimal health. (Note: the authors fully expect that children throughout life will eat from all four categories, but the point is to understand which foods fall into which category so you can help direct their health.) The categories are helpful acronyms and are as follows:

CRAP:

Chemical

Removes body's nutrients

Addictive

Processed.

Examples of some CRAP foods would be fast food, vegetable oils, cereal, GMOs, refined sugar and refined salt.

OKAY:

Ordinary

Knockoffs of real food

Adequate, not optimal

Yield subpar health if fed exclusively.

Examples of OKAY foods include unsoaked or unsprouted grains, grocery-store eggs, nonorganic fruits and vegetables, whole-food sweeteners.

PURE:

Pasture based

Unadulterated

Rich in nutrients

Enzyme containing

Examples of PURE foods include soaked grains, eggs from free-range chickens, etc.

POWER:

Protective

Optimal nutrition

Wisdom of the ancients

Enriching

Regenerating

Examples of POWER foods are liver and other organ meats form pastured, organically raised animals, fermented codliver oil, raw, grass-fed, organic dairy, bone marrow, fish roe, etc...

As stated before, the authors expect all children will at some point in their lives eat from all the different categories, but the point is to have the knowledge to know what is what and to be able to make food choices with that knowledge in mind.

The What, the Why, the How

Having laid the foundation for their views on nutrition, the next four chapters of Super Nutrition (Chapters 2-6) deal with baby at different stage. Each chapter comes complete with a wonderful, appetizing set of recipes (many taken from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions).

Each chapter explains the what, the why and the how of Erlich and Genzlinger's nutritional approach as well as easy referencing charts. Going into detail about each chapter is beyond what I can cover in this post, but I highly recommend owning this book because I promise you will want to continue referencing it as baby grows.

(Quick side note: this book has interspersed baby food ads from the 30s 40s and 50s to illustrate what “appealed to parents who selected and judged foods based on what their mothers had fed them.” (13). Canned foods were new. Prior to this, all baby food had been made at home... Worth owning just for how entertaining these ads are!)

Mom and Milk

After detailing each state of development and addressing important nuritional information for the child, Chapter 7 deals with something a little different: mom's diet. Chapter 7 is titled “Mom's Diet Does Matter: Critical Feeding Information for Breast-Fed Babies”. This chapter details the sort of diet nursing and pregnant mothers should aim for as well as helpful and non-judgmental advice for troubleshooting breastfeeding.

In Chapter 8 “Drugstore Formula Doesn't Cut It: Better Options Than Commercial Alternatives” Erlich and Genzlinger outline just what exactly is wrong with commercial formula. They don't just stop there, however. They give lots of alternatives for those who can't breastfeed: including looking into getting milk from other lactating mom's, supplementing store-bought formula (if this is your only option) with cod liver oil and probiotics, or three different WAPF-based homemade formulas (raw cow's milk, raw goat's milk or liver-based.)

Finally, to conclude the book, is a section of recommended reading that is full of many wonderful books for parents who wish to further study the topics discussed in the book.

See it here.

In short, this book is an absolutely indispensable, wonderful, affordable reference book. Super Nutrition For Babies makes the perfect companion to Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions' few short pages on how to feed infants. It fills in where that book leaves off. 

For the parent wishing to start their child off on a nutrient-rich diet, this book would make a wonderful, helpful companion.

Buy it for a pregnant friend, get if for yourself, give it to your child. Or, if your feeling lucky, enter the giveaway below! :)

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p.s. A big thanks to the authors for sponsoring this giveaway and sending me a copy of their wonderful book to review!