Every food page on this site ends with a short safety line and a link here. This is the long version — the guidance that applies to introducing any new food, rather than to one food in particular, so it lives in one place instead of being restated a hundred times.
It is general guidance drawn from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC. It is not medical advice and it does not replace your pediatrician, who knows your baby's history, growth and risk factors and can tell you where the general rule does not apply to you.
Introduce a single new food and wait three to five days before adding the next one. The gap is diagnostic: if a reaction appears, you know which food caused it. Introduce three new foods on a Tuesday and a rash on Wednesday tells you almost nothing, and you end up eliminating all three.
This applies to new foods, not to foods your baby has already eaten without incident. Once a food is established you can serve it alongside anything else.
Offer new foods earlier in the day rather than at the evening meal. A reaction that starts at 10am happens while you are awake, watching, and able to reach a doctor's office. The same reaction at 8pm happens in the dark.
The advice reversed. Guidance through the 2000s was to delay peanut, egg and other common allergens; the current AAP position is that early introduction reduces the risk of developing an allergy, and that there is no benefit to waiting. For infants with severe eczema or an existing egg allergy — the highest-risk group — the guidance is more specific still, and that conversation belongs with your pediatrician or an allergist before you start.
Practically: once your baby is eating solids, common allergens go into the rotation like any other food, in an age-appropriate texture, one at a time, with the same wait-and-watch gap.
Choking risk is about shape and texture, not about the food itself. The same food can be safe or dangerous depending on how it is cut.
Serve meals with your baby seated upright and supervised, never in a car seat, never propped, never while walking or crawling. Most choking incidents at this age involve a child who was moving or unattended.
Infant CPR and infant choking response are different from the adult versions, and reading about them is not the same as having practised them. The American Red Cross and the American Heart Association both run short in-person and online infant courses, and many hospitals offer one free to new parents. It is a couple of hours, once.
Most reactions to a new food are mild and local — a rash around the mouth, some fussiness, a change in stool. Those are worth a call to your pediatrician, not an ambulance.
Call 911 immediately for any of the following, which point to anaphylaxis or an obstructed airway:
Do not wait to see whether it improves, and do not drive to the emergency room if there is any breathing difficulty — an ambulance carries treatment that starts on the way.
A small number of rules on this site are absolute rather than advisory. Honey before twelve months is the clearest: it can carry Clostridium botulinum spores, an infant gut cannot suppress them, and infant botulism is a serious illness. This applies to raw honey, pasteurised honey, and honey baked into food. Pages stating a rule of this kind carry no purchase links, and an automated check fails our build if one ever appears there.
Talk to your pediatrician before introducing solids, and before introducing allergens specifically, if your baby was born prematurely, has severe eczema, has an existing food allergy, has reflux or a swallowing difficulty, or has a sibling with a significant food allergy. In each of those cases the general timeline is a starting point for a conversation rather than an answer.