Can children eat tofu?

Children are always picky eaters. This is because most families have only one child, so parents spoil their children too much. Everyone should have a comprehensive diet and not be too picky about food. However, there are many foods that children's stomachs cannot digest, so try to avoid letting children come into contact with such foods. Tofu contains a lot of protein. Eating more tofu is very beneficial to people's health. So can children eat tofu?

First, tofu is difficult to digest, which affects the baby's absorption and development;

Second, the tofu production process uses brine or gypsum, which may be harmful to the baby's body;

Third, tofu contains estrogen, which will cause the baby to develop sexually prematurely.

Whether tofu is easy to digest has always been a controversial point. Not to mention babies, even some adults will feel uncomfortable after eating it. Bloating caused by eating too much and the use of gypsum in the production process are the main reasons why tofu has always been considered difficult to digest.

The production process of tofu does use gypsum or brine containing heavy metals, and many people are afraid to eat it when they hear these two words. As for estrogen, many people know that bean foods are rich in estrogen and are called friends of women, but they don’t want their babies to suffer from the currently "popular" precocious puberty due to early supplementation of sex hormones.

From a scientific point of view, tofu can be added to the complementary food of infants under one year old. It does not conflict with breastfeeding, so there is no scientific basis to say that infants cannot eat tofu if they are not weaning. However, it is not suitable to add soy milk to babies under one and a half years old, because the baby's gastrointestinal function is not yet perfect and there is no digestive enzyme in the stomach to break down beans, so drinking soy milk can easily cause indigestion and diarrhea.

Since the production process of tofu changes the properties of beans, it can be added in appropriate amounts to complementary foods for infants under one year old. There is no need to worry too much about the production method of gypsum and brine. The essence of gypsum is calcium carbonate, which is harmless to the human body and can be easily digested by stomach acid. Traditional Chinese medicine also believes that gypsum can relieve muscles, clear heat, relieve restlessness and quench thirst.