Dr. Greene's Organic Prescription for babies

According to USDA data,8 your baby is likely getting less protein, iron, calcium, phosphorus, riboflavin, and vitamin C—to say nothing of the thousands of important food phytonutrients that hadn’t been discovered yet when the measurements began. When compared head to head, organic fruits and vegetables average about 30 percent higher antioxidant levels than their conventional counterparts.⁹

So don’t skimp on food for your baby. You don’t want foods with declining nutrients, grown from depleted soil. You don’t want overprocessed baby foods that may prepare her to prefer processed foods as a toddler.

And you don’t want all the toxic pesticides that get into our food, our water, and our soil from the cultivation of conventional produce. In my organic prescription for adults, I suggest starting with apples and potatoes as the most important fruit and vegetable. With babies, I prefer to make organic first choice for all fruits and vegetables

5. Organic baby food meat

If you feed your baby meat or poultry, I urge you to switch to organic. Consider beef, for example. Conventional nonorganic American beef is corn-fed or grain-fed beef. And it is not natural. Cattle are biologically designed to graze. When fed corn, their stomachs can become ten to one hundred times more acidic,¹⁰ welcoming bacteria such as E. coli O157:H7.¹¹ And the amount of antibiotics used to promote growth in livestock dwarfs the total amount used to treat diseases in people. Grass-fed organic beef tends to be leaner, and yet have five times the omega-3 fatty acids of conventional beef.¹² I suggest replacing conventional baby beef either with grass-fed organic beef or organic poultry, or with a variety of other plant sources of protein, such as garbanzo beans—a source of plant protein around the world—and quinoa, a complete protein.

6. Corn

Corn fattens up America’s beef cattle, accounting for 90 percent of U.S. feed grains.¹³ High fructose corn syrup fattens up America’s human population. Corn syrup is the carbohydrate in a number of infant formulas and in many products for babies and toddlers. (A parent recently told me about a “healthy fruit treat” she had discovered for her nine-month-old. The first ingredient was corn syrup, followed by sugar.) Corn starch, modified corn starch, and corn flour are some of the other ways that corn enters our diets. I’ve heard a number of parents say they haven’t fed their babies corn. Most have, though, without knowing it.

More American land is planted in corn than any other crop. ....read more