Baby's first foods: which meat to start with

Meat, a valuable food for your baby's growth, is introduced into their diet around the sixth or seventh month. But what types of meat should you choose? How should it be offered?

You can start with meat broths and then go on to the meat itself, which must be boiled or steamed at first and blended to a smooth purée.

- Chicken

Contains a lot of proteins and a large amount of lysine, an amino acid that is very important for growth. If you take the skin off, chicken meat is easy to digest, as its muscle fibres are very tender.

- Beef

Lean and very tender, beef is easy to digest and has a lot of proteins. It has more iron than chicken.

- Turkey

Very similar to chicken, although it is a bit fattier. It is full of nutrients and is easy to digest, but it is also important not to give children the skin, as it is very fatty.

- Horse

This is as good as other types of meat as far as its nutritional value is concerned, it is easy to digest and very rich in iron and it contains glycogen, a special type of nutrient that is responsible for its typical slightly sweet flavour, which makes it particularly attractive to children. It can be given from the age of nine months.

- Lamb and goat

In this case, you need to pay particular attention when choosing the meat in order to avoid giving pieces with too much fat. The leg is one of the most suitable parts.

- Pork

Although it used to be fatty and hard to digest, pork has changed a lot as a result of advances in the choice of breeds reared for their meat. Its cholesterol content has also decreased and is now not so different from that of beef or chicken. Pork can be given to little ones from the age of ten to eleven months.

- Rabbit

This is one of the best types of meat. However, you do have to be careful about the little bones that you can find in the meat when you cut it, which can be dangerous for children who are not very good at chewing yet.