Bloom First Rice Cereal, 6 Months Plus

Details

A first solid food: milled Indian rice with iron, zinc and thiamine, mixed thin with expressed milk, formula or boiled and cooled water. Single grain, because a first food should introduce one thing at a time and be easy to trace if it does not agree. The disclosure that matters most on this page is arsenic, and almost nothing on an Indian shelf makes it. Rice takes up inorganic arsenic from soil and irrigation water far more readily than other grains do, groundwater arsenic is a documented problem across parts of the Gangetic plain, and an infant eats a very large amount of cereal for its body weight. Those three facts together are why rice cereal, and not any other baby food, is the case that matters. So every lot is tested by ICP-MS before packing and held to 0.10 mg per kg of inorganic arsenic, the limit set for rice going into food for infants and young children. The current lot measures 0.04 mg per kg. Lead, cadmium and mercury sit on the same report. The second cheat is quieter. A cereal can say no added sugar and still taste sweet, because the starch was broken down with an amylase enzyme step that turns it into maltose. The cereal thins easily, it tastes sweet, the ingredient list stays short, and total sugars climb past twenty grams in a hundred. Nothing was added. It was made. So the figure printed here is total sugars, not added sugars: 0.9 g per 100 g, which is what rice carries on its own. The iron is the reason a first cereal exists at all. A term baby is born with an iron store that runs down at around six months, and milk alone does not replace it. Iron is the nutrient, and a shortfall shows as iron deficiency and anaemia: pallor, tiredness, poor feeding. That is the whole claim. We are not going to tell you what iron does for a brain, because a packet of cereal is not entitled to that sentence. Preparation is where the real-world risk sits, and it is the water, not the powder. Boil the water, cool it to lukewarm, about 40 C, wrist-tested. Not untreated tap water, not water stored in an open pot, not water from a filter you have not changed. The powder is not sterile either, so mix only what will be eaten, feed within thirty minutes and throw the rest away rather than warming it later.

• Inorganic arsenic 0.04 mg per kg tested, held to 0.10 mg per kg, ICP-MS, every lot
• Lead 0.010, cadmium under 0.005, mercury under 0.005 mg per kg, same report
• Total sugars 0.9 g per 100 g. No enzyme hydrolysis, no jaggery, no honey, no fruit concentrate
• No added salt. Sodium under 10 mg per 100 g, which is what the grain carries
• Iron 12 mg per 100 g as ferrous fumarate, so a 25 g serve carries 3.0 mg
• Zinc 4 mg and thiamine 0.5 mg per 100 g
• Single grain, so if something does not agree there is one thing to blame
• No palm oil, no flavouring, no colour, no preservative, no added culture
• Honest trade-off, and it is the one the enzyme step exists to hide: this tastes of rice. It is not sweet, it sets thicker than a hydrolysed cereal and it wants a little more liquid. A baby has no idea food is supposed to be sweet until somebody teaches them
• Honest trade-off, second: ragi or rice porridge made at home is cheaper and is perfectly good food. What it will not carry is the iron. The iron is what a packet buys you, and if you would rather fortify at home, do that instead
• Mother's milk is best for your baby. This is a complementary food from 6 months and not a breast-milk substitute. The notice is required by the Infant Milk Substitutes, Feeding Bottles and Infant Foods Act 1992, which also forbids us putting a picture of a baby or a health claim on the pack