How to have a healthy baby

1. If anyone in your baby's family suffers from allergic disorders - including complaints like hay-fever whose connection with food is not obvious - your baby may be extra-liable to them too. Let him start life on breast milk exclusively if you possibly can, and consult your health visitor or your doctor before you start giving anything else, whether formula milk, solid foods or other baby feeding products. Consult again before you attempt to introduce any of the high-risk items.

2. One of the other baby feeding products that you need to avoid is added salt, which can stress immature kidneys, hot spices that might burn the baby's mouth or even inflame his stomach, and coffee, tea and alcohol, which are all drugs.

3. Be sparing with added sugar and be sure to offer at least as many savoury foods as sweet foods. Many babies easily develop a preference for sweet foods which is one of the baby feeding products that puts their dental health at risk. It is worth making sure that when yours joins the drink-and-a-biscuit brigade, his feelings are not hurt by bread sticks and drinks of water rather than chocolate chip cookies and apple juice.

4. Cow's milk is another baby feeding products you need to avoid (or goat's or sheep's milk) except perhaps for mixing foods. For drinking, use only breast milk or formula during the whole of the first year. If you especially want to give a more "grown-up milk", you could use a "follow-on formula" after nine months, but these baby milks for older babies eating some solid foods offer no advantages over the baby milks used from birth -and of course no advantage over breast milk so avoid as much as possible these baby feeding products. Although soya milk is often recommended for babies who are thought to be intolerant of cow's milk products, it can itself cause allergic reactions. Use soya only if it is prescribed by your doctor - and then only in the form of a soya-based infant formula.

5. Introduce the new food you want to give him each time. Use a single teaspoonful the first times you feed him. If it should disagree with your baby you will know exactly which food to avoid for a few weeks.

6. Remember that he cannot chew yet. If you feed him lumps he will have to swallow them as lumps. He will not like doing so and he may choke so try to avoid these kind of baby feeding products. So sieve, or liquidize his early meals. The type of food mill often called a "mouli" is especially useful because it both liquidizes and sieves foods. If you use a liquidizer or food processor it will produce what looks like baby food but still contains the pips and tough skins or fibres his digestion will find difficult to cope with. You will need to use a sieve as well.