A Dietitian’s Guide to Infant Cereal Part 4: can babies digest the starch in infant cereal?

Welcome to Part 4 of my 8 part series: A Dietitian’s Guide to Infant Cereal.  My goal in writing this series is to provide you with the education you need about these cereals to make an informed choice about when and what cereals you’d like to feed your baby.   To stay connected with me and receive updates on this series, subscribe via RSS, or like Smart Nutrition on facebook!

Part 1: Infant Cereals: Sugarbowls in Disguise?

Part 2: A Brief History of Infant Cereals

Part 3: The Pros and Cons of Infant Cereals

Part 5: Should I Make My Own Infant Cereal?

Part 6: How to Choose the Right Infant Cereal

Part 7: Myths About Infant Cereal

Part 8: 5 Ways to Use Infant Cereal

Can babies even digest starch?

If you’ve ever googled “infant cereal” you may have come across this damning article on The Food Renegade. Part of the author’s criticism of infant cereal is her claim that babies can’t digest the starch in it. 

Here’s a snippet from her rant:

[blockquote cite=”The Food Renegade” type=”center”]“In order to digest grains, your body needs to make use of an enzyme called amylase. Amylase is the enzyme responsible for splitting starches. And, guess what? Babies don’t make amylase in large enough quantities to digest grains until after they are a year old at the earliest.”[/blockquote]

This is a classic case of someone with limited nutrition knowledge taking a piece of information that’s correct and then jumping to a conclusion that’s incorrect.

 Yes, the enzyme amylase is needed for starch digestion. The enzyme breaks down the structure of carbohydrates in starch into smaller sugar molecules.

Yes, babies make very little pancreatic amylase (made in the pancreas and released into the small intestine) compared to adults.

Babies Find a Way

This seems like bad news for babies BUT when scientists have assessed whether babies can digest starch they’ve found that babies somehow absorb 99% of the starch they consume! How can this be?

They discovered that babies..

• produce considerable amount of salivary amylase that travels from the mouth to the intestine where it digests starch
• receive a considerable amount of amylase from mama’s milk (if breastfed, of course)
• produce another type of amylase in the small intestine, called glucoamylase 

All these other pieces of information give us an idea as to why babies actually can digest starch, and do so quite efficiently. 

If you’re interested in the long answer to this question, The Science of Mom has done an excellent job writing about the research on babies, amylase, and starch digestion.

Part 1: Infant Cereals: Sugarbowls in Disguise?

Part 2: A Brief History of Infant Cereals

Part 3: The Pros and Cons of Infant Cereals

Part 5: Should I Make My Own Infant Cereal?

Part 6: How to Choose the Right Infant Cereal

Part 7: Myths About Infant Cereal

Part 8: 5 Ways to Use Infant Cereal

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