"Why my daughter won't be getting sugar for the first 1000 days."

Image: Lanai and Molly (supplied)

I’m not an anti-sugar fun sponge. Far from it.

In fact, as I’m sitting here typing this out I am trying to stop myself from devouring an entire block of chocolate (it’s been a crazy week of my nine-month-old daughter waking me up at 4am each morning and refusing to go back to bed. GO. TO. SLEEP).

But for our kids, I’m of the opinion that the less sugar and salt they get, the better. I think for many of us we’ve been brought up with the mentality that in order for something to taste good it needs to have sugar or salt in it. You might be surprised how much hidden salt and sugar there is in kids-specific products – don’t even get me started on “baby” yoghurt.

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New research has shown that the first 1000 days of a child’s nutrition are the most important when it comes to laying the foundations for their future health. I’m going to get technical here, so try not to tune out. Scientists have shown that poor eating choices in early life can influence our epigenetics and potentially change the way our bodies are equipped to deal with things.

As mums, most of us pay so much attention to what we eat and drink during our pregnancies. But by the time it comes to starting solids we’re so exhausted from trying to keep up with the daily chaos of life with a baby that we just simply don’t have time to devote a huge amount of creativity to our food choices.

Starting solids with Molly (that’s our cute little 4am-waking munchkin) was a wild adventure. Molly, like her mother, is fiercely independent and right from the beginning she point blank refused to let us feed her - instead, she demanded to try and use the spoon herself or eat finger food.

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My husband and I said from the start that we wanted to give Molly no added sugar and low-salt food options. We’d read up on how important the first few years of nutrition were to a child and like every parent wanted to do the best for our child. But after just a few short weeks of cooking separate meals for Molly and my husband and myself, life was getting pretty tough. I was struggling with making finger food type options for Molly that were sugar-free and low salt, along with feeding myself and my husband and keeping up with everything else that comes along with a baby.

I desperately wanted to keep up with our pledge for Molly’s nutrition but had no idea how I could keep on top of it all without figuring out how to clone myself. I also wanted to start eating together as a family. I have a bit of a unique upbringing and didn’t have much of that growing up, so I wanted to make meal times a special family event for all of us. I’ve always loved cooking, and it was through cooking that I found my now adopted family (you can read more about me here)

So I got creative and decided to start making up baby/family friendly meals that all of us could eat. I wanted to just cook one meal rather than two each night; tasty, delicious food that was baby-friendly, with no added-sugar and low salt, that didn’t make my husband and I gag with how bland and boring it tasted.

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It’s so much easier making food that all of us can eat, and you’d actually be surprised with just how tasty things are without added sugar and loads of salt.

Even my husband, who really just wishes I would cook him a big, fatty, juicy burger every now and then, has been fooled.

Here are my top four dishes to try in the first year of solids. You can find more recipes and instructional photos at my website www.goodbabykitchen.com.

Lanai is the National Political Reporter for News Corp Australia and runs her own website, Good Baby Kitchen. If you want to try out more of her recipes you can visit www.goodbabykitchen.com.