Book Review: Super Baby Food

A comprehensive guide to feeding your baby, loaded with misinformation, arrogant tones, and no credentials.

Ruth Yaron is a mother of two. She decided to write a book about what she fed her children.

She has some very good ideas for parties, healthier versions for fruit snacks, great manners in which to prepare baby food and offers loads of information about each fruit and vegetable. The advantages for making your own baby food are you can control what goes into the food. This is wonderful if you have children with allergies. Also, you can control the texture. When I fed my children homemade baby food, they seemed to adapt quicker and easier to new foods and table foods much easier than their friends who ate from store brands. Despite that my children are picky like everyone else's, they love fruits and vegetables and I get comments all the time on how well they eat.

Unfortunately, despite the wonderful potential this book has, it is also loaded with extra misinformation. Ruth Yaron recommends feeding nut butters as early as ten months of age. Most pediatricians (if not all) do not recommend giving children any food considered a high allergen until they are older. Imagine having an infant suffering from an anaphylactic reaction? Would you be able to identify one? Or would you feel safer following your doctor's advice and wait until your child is older where the symptoms would be easier to recognize? Also, she suggests feeding spinach and carrots early as well. Depending on where you are getting your spinach and carrots, they can be loaded with chemicals.

What adds to all of the misinformation in this book is the fact she writes with a patronizing attitude and has absolutely no official training outside of parenting. She is not a nutritionist, nor is she a dietician, and she is not even a doctor!

Then, as if that was not enough, she strays off topic from her book's title, Super Baby Food and suggests tie dying stained onesies, not owning an iron in the house as it may be too dangerous, making your own crayons, a section on bibs, and how to clean your house. Some readers may find this extra information as a bonus. I found this to be an annoyance. If I wanted a book on how to clean my house, I would have bought one. I wanted a book on feeding my baby. What she may have considered was renaming this book to suggest that these types of suggestions were included in this book, or come up with a second book.

Parenting is a tough job. No one wants to be told that what they are doing is wrong. Each child does not come with his own instruction manual. Then, you get this book where Ruth Yaron preaches her beliefs and basically infers if you do not raise your children her way, then you are not being a good parent. After reading this book, it would be really hard for any mother not to take her tone personally.

If you are an intelligent person who can sift through the information in this book, listen to your doctor and use your instinct for raising and feeding you child, than this is a good book. But, if you are a person that believes everything in print, and you plan to follow this book like it is the Bible, then this book could be dangerous to you.

My suggestion is for someone who is a registered nutritionist get together with a pediatrician, and revise this entire book. There are too many people out there that take everything at face value and do not research on their own. Having a book like this on the shelves was a wonderful idea yet it was poorly executed.

TITLE: Super Baby Food
AUTHOR: Ruth Yaron
PUBLISHER: F. J. Roberts Publishing Company; 2nd edition (June 1998)
ISBN: 0965260313