Is it safe to feed grapes to one year old Toddler?

Question

Once I heard a news where a toddler died while eating grapes in a restaurant. The toddler's parents was nearby and eating food and then they decided to feed the baby toddler some grapes. Somehow the toddler started choking and began gasping for air. The frantic parents tried to whack the back of the toddler to induce the grapes to come out of the toddler's throat but it was too late. The toddler couldn't breathe properly while being choked by the grapes. Nothing could bring the dead toddler to life even when later the paramedics arrived and performed CPR on the toddler. What precaution should we take to prevent such incident?

Answer 1

Feeding grapes and any other solid fruit or food is fine provided, those foods are chopped or made into small pieces, before feeding to the babies. What happens when the food are not made into pieces is that those foods will enter the baby's small throat and get stuck there. As the baby struggle to swallow the food, it gets lodged onto the throat further more until the windpipe is pushed close, reducing the amount of air going into the baby's lung. If help was not offered properly as was in the case of this infant baby, then within four minutes or so, the baby would have died. So always remember to made the foods into smaller pieces before feeding baby any solid food. Sometimes, it is better to let the baby eat liquid food until they are much older to handle food by themselves.