You may have been advised to add cereals to his bottle to help him sleep better. Introducing solids may seem like a harmless trick but it’s not.
If given solids too early, allergens can slip through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream, resulting in the baby producing antibodies against them. This could potentially lead to allergies and eczema. Moreover, often a baby will automatically thrust solids back out to protect his digestive tract.
At around six months a baby starts producing adult-type enzymes needed to break down food for digestion. Having solids before they can digest it, can cause them to have tummy problems and not fully absorb the nutrients.
Moreover, sleep solutions are rarely that simple.
According to recent Sleep Medicine article, parents tend to over-estimate how much more a baby sleeps when diet was altered. Moreover, the authors of the study often admitted that “the commonly held belief that introducing solids early will help infants sleep better could have produced a reporting bias.”
Finally, babies wake up for all sorts of reasons, not just hunger. So, adding cereals to help him sleep might actually just end up disturbing his sleep more with digestive issues.
