White rice cereal for babies: yes or no?

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While eating breakfast this morning, a story on Good Morning America caught my ear. A pediatrician in California, Dr. Alan Greene, has started a campaign against white rice cereal-- traditionally recommended by pediatricians as an introductory solid food for infants. Parents in the US have been told to feed their babies white rice cereal first because it is free of most allergens and easy to digest.

Dr. Greene believes this advice is misguided, and that white rice cereal may actually predispose children to obesity. According to his theory, feeding babies white rice cereal is akin to feeding them sugar in terms of nutritional value. Furthermore, because the starchy cereal is the first solid food experience many American babies have, it affects their taste preferences for life, setting them up to eat more refined carbohydrates and sugars later on and potentially become obese. Instead of white rice cereal, Dr. Greene recommends that parents choose an iron-fortified whole grain baby cereal. "Let every child's first food be a real food," he says.

Of course there are people who disagree with Dr. Greene. Unsurprisingly, Gerber made a statement noting the lack of scientific studies to support any link between white rice cereal and childhood obesity. The baby food company may be biased, but a presumably impartial associate professor of pediatrics, Dr. Keith Ayoob, has also said that focus on one particular food is probably inappropriate. The American Academy of Pediatrics makes no distinction between white and brown rice cereals in their infant feeding recommendations.

Before I explain my stance on the issue, let me first acknowledge that there isn't any scientific evidence of what Dr. Greene is suggesting. So, his argument is not strictly "evidence-based." But (and this is a big but), a lack of evidence does not disprove any theory. We can only have evidence of what researchers choose to study. It just so happens that no one has studied white rice cereal. If no one ever decided to compare lung cancer rates in smokers and non-smokers, you can be sure tobacco companies would be reminding us that there are no studies to support a link! There are never studies that show something is dangerous.. until there are studies. Another example in recent history of a food presumed to be good until it turned out to be bad is margarine- and other products where saturated fat was replaced by trans fat.

So what should we do when there is no evidence one way or another? Should we assume that white rice cereal is healthy for babies until there are studies proving otherwise, or should we assume it's not healthy until there are studies proving otherwise? Are foods innocent until proven guilty? My answer is: it depends. When you are trying to decide whether a food is likely to be good for you or your child, ask yourself: if I had to grow and produce all of my own food, could I still eat it? In other words, is this food very close to nature or has it been tampered with in some way? If the answer is yes, then I would assume the food is healthy until there is reason to believe differently. If the answer is no, then I would assume it's not. In the case of white rice cereal, you probably could not produce this on a small farm by yourself, so I would agree with Dr. Greene and choose the whole grain cereal instead, unless and until research studies prove that white rice cereal is just as good.

Although I don't have hard evidence to back up my theory this time, I do have quite a bit of logic on my side. Human health is largely the product of interactions between genes and the environment. Natural selection produces organisms that are adapted to their environment. Because human genes have not changed much in the last few million years, it is reasonable to assume that our bodies are best adapted to the environment our ancestors lived in back then- not the one we live in now. White rice didn't exist when our ancestors were evolving. And actually, brown rice wouldn't have been a large part of our ancestors' diets either. Before the advent of agriculture (only about 10,000 years ago), humans didn't eat much grains at all- whole or refined. But refined grains are even more novel; they didn't come on the scene until the Industrial Revolution. The process of removing the bran and germ of grains- the parts that contain many vitamins, minerals, plus essential fatty acids and fiber-requires mechanized mills that were not developed until the late 19th century- practically minutes ago in evolutionary terms!

What are the odds that a food that didn't exist until a little over a hundred years ago would be a more appropriate choice for an infant than one that is not processed and has all of its nutrients intact? If I were a betting woman (and I am), I would put my money on the brown rice cereal over the white rice cereal without hesitation. Whether or not white rice cereal is truly as harmful as Dr. Greene suggests it may be, it is highly unlikely that it provides any benefit at all over the whole grain version.