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Toddlers: 12 - 24 Months
Anemia??
Just got a call from the DR and my boy is anemic. It actually doesn't surpise me he has a diet of pasta, sauce, maca and cheese, oatmeal fruit, and little veggies. My husband (who doesn't have time to cook) feeds him dinner and needs something quick! I'm work 2 jobs each day and cook after LO goes to sleep for the night - Any suggestions would be helpful!!!
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Re: Anemia??
Pasta + red sauce with meat (Iron + vitamin C)
Mac and Cheese (add ground turkey and spinach)
Oatmeal mixed with raisins (iron in raisins)
Iron rich cereals for snacks (Cheerios, Life, Raisin Bran)
Beans and Rice
How much milk is DC drinking? Other dairy? This is important as too much milk can cause anemia too! (calcium and iron dont mix!)
And have DC take it with juice; just an ounce works. Vitamin C helps with iron absorption. Also your DC may get hard stools - keep up the fruits!
Well that might be it - I just weaned from BF-ing last week and he drinks TONS of milk (Juice and water too)....Thanks for the suggestions!
I don't think anyone has mentioned it yet but in general it is easier for the body to absorb iron from animal meats than vegetable/fruit/pasta sources but that doesn't mean to ignore iron from vegetable/fruit/pasta. So I would be sure your LO is getting at least one serving of meat a day, two if possible.
WebMD is a good website to discuss Iron deficiencies. It discusses the different sources of iron (animal vs. plant) and also gives serving sizes with approximate quantity of iron in that serving. The site is: www.webmd.com and I searched "iron rich foods" and went to the first two articles "Iron Rich Foods" and "Top 10 Iron Rich Foods" provided the most info for us...
I keep little bags of cooked ground beef or turkey in the freezer so if I'm running short on time, I just thaw a little bag of meat and presto LO has meat in front of her. And ground meats can very easily be tossed into almost any non-meat meal...
You can also switch to fortified juices since iron is more easily absorbed with vitamin C. I don't recall any brands specifically being just Iron fortified, but they do have some that are fortified with the most commonly sought vitamins and minerals...
Pasta can also come fortified to have extra iron. Certain beans like kidney beans
I tried the spinach with LO and I wish I had the camera ready. LO's face was the perfect picture of horrified shock with bits of spinach falling out of her open mouth (then she oh so sweetly picked each piece up with two fingers only and handed it back to me). Hopefully your LO will like spinach a lot more than my LO :-)
Good Luck!
DS was anemic based on his blood draw when he was 12 months (okay, we were bad and I lagged in going to the lab so he was closer to 14 months). We were told to give him fer-in-sol (an iron supplement) that I couldn't find because you have to ask the pharmacist so we've been giving him poly-vi-sol with iron and working on eating more iron rich foods. We added more meat to his diet (lean red meat, pork and chicken), beans, iron rich veggies (I never knew artichokes were high in iron), raisins, cheerios, puffs, and other have mentioned that iron is more easily absorbed with vitamin C so we also added more citrus in his diet. We just had his 15 month checkup on Friday and iron levels were fine.
Other good iron options:
Fortified cereal
Breads
Fortified juice (I didn't want to create a juice monster so we stayed away from juices)
Fish
most green leafy vegetables
Just google iron rich foods for toddlers and there is a ton out there on the web! It's usually an easy fix in little ones and our pedi did mention calcium makes it harder to absorb iron so we focused less on making sure he got 16 ounces of milk a day and more on iron rich foods.
my son actually just started eating meat.. he was never anemic b/c i had him on a super strict diet (he has severe food allergies so he has to be on a diet)
anyways.. the main way i use to add iron to his food was steaming veggies and always including a little bit of beat for the red color. then pureeing it (really thick and smooth texture) and adding it as a pasta sauce with a fake cheese sauce (he's allergic to milk so it has to be fake).. he LOVES it. but would never ever eat veggies alone. The color of the sauce is pink to red -depending on how much beat i use. And i sometimes add some agave nectar to it for a sweeter taste.
I even add this sauce to his "pizza" ..I freeze it in small batches. it has saved my life. lol.
Also, you can give him beans for added iron.
when you look at the ingredients, you can see that almost everything has protein/iron in it. Choose pasta that has more. some have more than others.