butterfilter:

July 20, 2006 11:43 PM

Why feed babies butter?

An acquaintance of mine recently told me a story about his infant: they took their kid to a pediatrician who told them to feed their baby half a stick of butter every day? What would ever be the purpose for this?

posted by bash to food & drink (18 comments total)

A few possibilities:
a) acquaintance is lying
b) acquaintance is joking
c) acquaintance remembered the amount wrong
d) pediatrician is joking
e) pediatrician is an idiot

there are arguments on both sides about feeding babies liberal amounts of fat.. some say it's good, some say bad.. but 1/2 a stick? That's completely nuts for a full grown person.
posted by twiggy at 11:54 PM on July 20, 2006

I bet your acquaintance is a vegan, isn't he?

In the last 20 years doctors have been seeing a lot of babies whose parents live on (ahem) eccentric diets, particularly no-fat diets. Those babies haven't been developing normally.

Fat is a normal nutrient, and for babies fat is essential. There's a reason why whole milk has a lot of fat: babies need it. And these babies, whose parents were living on granola, tofu-milk, and macrobiotic vegeratian diets, were seriously malnourished as a result, primarily because of a shortage of fat, especially saturated fat, in their diets.

Like as not that's what happened in this case. I doubt the doctor was totally serious about that as long term advice, but it may have been intended to try to get through to the parents that what they think is a healthy diet for adults can cause serious harm to growing babies.

Which happens to be the truth.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:01 AM on July 21, 2006

What Steven C. Den Beste states above may definitely have some truth to it based on my own personal experience of feeding babies butter. On my father's side of the family (who are all vegetarians) it's common to feed lumps of butter to infants whereas my mothers's side (good ol' meat eaters) find this act slightly bizarre. They may feel that butter is an adequate substitute for the fatty stuff they miss out on when they don't eat meat.
posted by liquorice at 12:16 AM on July 21, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

The baby I take care of was recently put on a high-fat diet for 1 month which consisted of -- at the pediatrician's suggestion -- copious amounts of butter. Baby was at the lowest end of the growth chart for his age and slightly underweight for his size (likely due to a bad stomach bug he'd had before his 18-month wellness check-up). The pediatrician was worried that he had a nutrient-absorption problem. The way to test this was by putting Baby on a high-fat diet. After 4 weeks of feeding Baby avacado mixed with mayonnaise, buttered AND cream-cheesed croissants, vegetables literally doused in butter, and spoonfuls of peanut butter, he put on a tremendous (for a baby) amount of weight, and the pediatrician was satisfied that the kid could absorb nutrients.

It could be your friend's pediatrician was using half a stick of butter as a guideline for how much fat the baby needed every day. It may sound outrageous, but babies do need a lot of fat in their diets. And if you need a kid on a high-fat diet for any reason (like the one I mentioned), butter is one of the easiest ways to increase their fat intake. It can be added to almost anything a kid eats, and most babies aren't picky about butter.
posted by Felicity Rilke at 12:35 AM on July 21, 2006

I think Felicity has the right idea. They eat tons of meat (I've seen it happen), and they don't seem too wacky. I know the baby was on the low weight side. But when they went to the head doctor at the practice and said they wanted to switch to a different pediatrician, the head pediatrician said, "it was the butter thing, wasn't it?"
posted by bash at 12:56 AM on July 21, 2006

I just wanted to say, half a stick of butter is a lot of saturated fat, but is not my any means insane, for an adult or an infant. It is 46 grams of fat. There are 36-40 grams of fat in 32 ounces of breast milk, on average (roughly what a 6 month old would consume.)
posted by Nothing at 1:16 AM on July 21, 2006

I don't want to derail, but I just wanted to point out that being vegetarian doesn't inherently mean that babies are undernourished. I didn't eat meat when I was a baby and I was gigantic.
posted by dame at 6:46 AM on July 21, 2006

My sister and her husband are vegans and have an underweight 9-month old with a dairy allergy. Their doctors told them to mix some neutral-tasting oil into anything the baby will eat to "fatten her up". Right now the baby gets about half her daily calories from the oil.
posted by EiderDuck at 7:02 AM on July 21, 2006

On a purely hedonistic note, the sweetly astonished, happy look on the face of a baby given a pat of melting butter is reason enough to feed it to them.
posted by paulsc at 7:27 AM on July 21, 2006 [2 favorites has favorites]

Felicity: i wouldnt want to change those diapers. ugh.
posted by joeblough at 8:01 AM on July 21, 2006

It sounds like you may have your answer, but I wanted to add that my friend had an 8-month old who wasn't sleeping more than 5 hours at night because she was waking up hungry. She wasn't interested in meats or other filling foods yet, so the pediatrician recommended adding a big pat of butter to whatever baby food she WOULD eat, in order to increase satiety. I really don't think it was 1/2 stick, though. Maybe 1 or 2 tablespoons.
posted by peep at 8:25 AM on July 21, 2006

(slight derail) While doctors disagree...many say that you should avoid giving your child peanuts of any kind until they're three.
posted by nadawi at 8:27 AM on July 21, 2006

I agree with Steven up above and just wanted to add that I had a friend who was underweight as a baby and his parents were told to give him beer to help fatten him up.

But that was 35 years ago.
posted by fenriq at 8:36 AM on July 21, 2006

Snort.
DenOfSizer, that was *evil* *Grin*
posted by Arthur Dent at 11:41 AM on July 21, 2006

Eiderduck: a dairy allergy wouldn't matter to vegans, since they do not eat dairy anyway. A nine month old should get the majority of its calories from breast milk. Vegan breast milk is just as fat as omnivore breast milk. It seems very dangerous to give a baby that much oil. Babies need vitamins, minerals, antibodies, etc.

I think many people in this thread do not understand what babies eat. For the first year of age, milk is the most important food. Breast milk is 50% fat. Doctors unfortunately also often do not know that, which may be the reason for those strange recommendations. My doctor told me that at nine months my milk was just water, that there were no nutrients at all anymore. Apparently my baby lived on air.
posted by davar at 12:50 PM on July 21, 2006

Davar, a lot of the kinds of couples who have this problem and get this advice from their doctors are two-income, both professional. Which is to say, the babies don't get breast milk because Mom's got a career to pursue.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:56 PM on July 21, 2006

"...the babies don't get breast milk because Mom's got a career to pursue."

Easy on the stereotypes there, dude. I have a career. My big kid was breastfed until fourteen months, and my little 'un is still on the boob. They're both fat as butter. My secret weapon? A breastpump.

The kid I knew whose ped gave his parents the stick-o-butter advice was also breastfed. Kids are different. Some kids need a high fat diet.
posted by rdc at 4:15 PM on July 21, 2006

I work as a medical transcriptionist and our pediatric department has a growth clinic that sees underweight babies. The parents/caregivers are always told to "calorie boost at every opportunity" by adding butter, cheese, cream cheese, sour cream, ranch dressing, etc. There are all sorts of developmental problems that can result from inadequate growth at this early stage; it can be quite serious and isn't necessarily related to parents' dietary practices, odd or otherwise.
posted by redheadeb at 7:57 PM on July 21, 2006