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About the Author
Ruth Yaron is married with three children and lives near the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. When her twins were born 18 years ago, they were ten weeks premature and very sick. This is what prompted years of research on pediatric nutrition. When her third son was born in 1994, she was able to quit her job as a professor at a local university and become a stay-at-home mom. During the next two years, she wrote the Super Baby Food Book, which became a best seller and is still the best-selling book on the subject of feeding babies solid foods.
A letter from Ruth
Dear Fellow Parent,
Thank you for visiting the web site for the SUPER BABY FOOD book! Thirteen years ago, when my twin sons were born 9½ weeks premature and very sick, I knew that the most important thing I could do for them (besides giving them my love) was to feed them the healthiest diet possible. It was the mid 80's and America was into "health foods." But as much as I read about health and nutrition, I found that there was no single complete book about how to feed a baby healthy food.
I fed the twins a diet of homemade, mostly-organic, whole grain cereals, fruits, and home-cooked vegetables. At the mother-of-twins club meetings, I would listen to all the other moms—including those with full-term twins with good birth weights—talk about projectile vomit, diarrhea, high fevers, and often hospitalization for pneumonia. I listened in silence, thinking about how blessed I was to have healthy babies. As my pediatrician is my witness, my sons never got sick, NEVER ! She told me that my twins were THE healthiest babies she had ever seen in all her years of practice, including those babies who were full-term singletons. The average baby gets sick 6-12 times per year just as the twins' father and I (according to our mothers) did when we were babies, so I don't think my sons have inherited a super immune system. I have not done a medical study to prove it, but I claim that it was the Super Baby Food Diet that made my sons so very healthy. Let some scientist prove me wrong!
My sons' diet became my mission and I could not read enough about nutrition and health food. Back then I was an inexperienced cook and used dozens of natural foods cookbooks to learn my way around the kitchen. I was a fanatic, and my friends and family got tired of hearing me talk about healthy diets. Some refused to eat my tofu-carob wheat germ holiday pie; others laughed about it! Since then, to their relief (and mine), I have lightened up.
Three years ago, my third son was born and I again pulled out the mini-blend containers and ice cube trays. This time I was fortunate enough to be able to quit my teaching job at the local university and stay home with my baby. As I made my son's Super Porridge while watching Sesame Street, I thought about other moms feeding their babies over-priced, nutritionally-inferior, commercially-processed boxed rice cereal, and the idea for the Super Baby Food book was born. I had written books previously on un-important subjects, like computers and statistics. Nothing ground-breaking like healthy baby food! I was so excited to be able to work at home on something that I love so much and that interests me so much.
About the Second Edition
I received a lot of feedback from readers of the first edition, and I want to thank the hundreds of moms from all over the world who took some of their precious time to email me, phone me, and write me letters! Of course I loved the compliments, but I especially appreciated the criticisms and comments on how to improve and add to the first edition. I listened carefully to each idea and used many of them for this second edition. I became aware of some common concerns of new parents and discuss them more thoroughly in this edition.
The main changes to this second edition are the new sections on baby-safe, environmentally-friendly baby products and household cleaning products, and the fun stuff. I've added hundreds of new tips and included new nutrition and diet facts which have come out since the last printing, including the warning about peanut allergies (page 32). Remember that the information in this book is recent only up to the copyright date; I can't predict future findings. For example, some baby food cookbooks still on library shelves today contain recipes with raw eggs and honey. The authors simply had no way of knowing about the dangers at the time. New facts come out continuously, which is why it is imperative that you collaborate the information in this book with the advice of your pediatrician, who has the latest information on feeding your baby. Start by showing her the schedule on pages 86-87.
A metric equivalents appendix is now included for international readers; some have told me that they find it strange that we still haven't converted to the metric system. With regard to publishing technicalities, the text layout has been changed for better readability, and I've expanded the index by more than double. This book is quite large, but believe it or not, some information has been deleted since the first edition. Most of my readers who gave me feedback felt that I went a little overboard in the first edition about food drying and homemade bread baking, so I removed about half of that information. Hope you won't miss it! If so, you can read the other books I've listed as references on those subjects.
Hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Thanks and enjoy the ride!
Ruth Yaron
BS, MBA, MS
author "Super Baby Food"
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