New study says beginning to feed solid food earlier helps baby get better sleep

Most medical practitioners used to recommend that mothers exclusively breastfeed until about 6 months of age and only then begin to introduce solid foods. However, new research suggests that an alternative feeding plan is not onlysafe for babies but might even provide key advantages.

Introducing a child to solid baby foods after just 3 months was associated with significant improvement in nighttime sleep and slightly fewer wakings throughout the week compared with babies who began eating solids later, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

For Dr. Gideon Lack, senior author of the study and a professor and head of the Department of Paediatric Allergy at King's College London, the study's single most important finding was the "more than 50% reduction in the number of families reporting severe sleep disturbances in their babies." Better even, these improvements in sleep seen early on did not end after seven or eight months as the researchers expected but continued throughout the first year of infancy and beyond.

Of course, there are also other ways to improve an infant's sleep that are not related to feeding, including having consistent sleep routines, avoiding over-stimulation or trying a non-medicated herbal supplement like Biobubs. Using only selected natural ingredients that are based on a century old secret recipe, Biobubs is carefully crafted and hand packed in Australia. It is gluten- and lactose- free, contains only a tiny amount of sucrose to be tasty for baby and comes in a convenient format that is easy to administer, even on the go.