Beliefs, Evaluations, and use of commercial infant Food: A survey among German parents

Abstract

Complementary feeding is a critical milestone for parents, who must decide the extent to which they feed their infants with homemade foods (HMFs) or commercial infant foods (CIFs). The current study focused on how parents perceive and evaluate CIFs and what drives them to use these products. Understanding the wide variety of factors that influence parents’ decisions to use CIFs as a food source is crucial to helping them make more balanced food choices for their infants. Data from an online survey with 858 German parents revealed their negative perceptions of CIFs, particularly in terms of nutritional quality and texture, and concerns that CIFs contain higher levels of pesticides and heavy metals compared to HMFs, despite acknowledging the expertise of the infant nutrition industry. These perceptions were likely to be driven by the ’natural-is-better’ belief and parents’ desire for control over the ingredients in their infants’ meals, contributing to their skepticism towards CIFs. Additionally, our study found that while many parents know traditional nutrition guidelines, they are less familiar with recent updates. Parents’ benefit beliefs about CIFs and parents’ trust in the food industry strongly influenced the use of CIFs, while infant age and parent gender had a less strong, yet significant influence on CIFs consumption. Overall, the present study offers new quantitative insights into the factors that motivate parents to use CIFs. Furthermore, it underscores the need for health authorities to improve their communication strategies towards parents concerning new dietary guidelines.