Thickening bottles with rice cereal or gel mix

Haven't been recommended this but it's not safe especially with rice cereal. There are anti reflux formulas though. Unsure if it's the same in the US but in the UK your doctor can prescribe anti reflux milk or a liquid to put into normal milk to help thicken the milk, is this the gel mix you mean? X

I wouldn’t do it personally. So many doctors are working off of VERYYY outdated advice

Does ur baby have colic as well? Or trouble with weight gain? If neither of those I would say just invest in some more burp cloths and extra sheets. My baby had really bad reflux but it didn’t bother her just a big mess. She kind of phased out of it around 5-6 months. She still spits up occasionally but much less

Rice and cereal in a bottle is a choking hazard listed by the NHS over in the UK. But as above said we do have thickeners that can be prescribed.

Please don’t it’s a choking hazard

I had a pediatrician say it but I don’t trust him at all, and he kept saying all these things that I’ve read are bad on the internet to do. So I trust the internet compared to him on new info

As others have said, baby rice is an absolute no as it makes the bottle lumpy and a choking hazard. My GP prescribed thickener for my eldest (Carobel I think?) which just thickened it up enough to be harder to come back up. That didn't do much for us and we ended up moving to infant gaviscon instead which really helped. She outgrew the reflux at around 4m adjusted thankfully, as she started sitting.

I’m 33 and this was out of date advice when I was a baby. Please don’t do it.

So I’m in Georgia and I actually have a family full of people with reflux. All of my babies at two months had to start using rice cereal (any other mixing option would still trigger their reflux) and it helped so much! My doctors key thing was, make it minimal. Start with just trying to spoon feed them one or two spoonfuls and then feeding a bottle. If that works, do it that way, if not get mixing more of the bottle with the rice cereal until it helps them keep the bottle down and with spit up and then keep it steady till it changes. It worked for all my kids and it made them better eaters and keep down their food better.

I would like to point out that you have to spoon feed it mixed with part of the bottle not just mixed in the bottle because as others have said that is a serious choking hazard. ⚠️ also rice cereal is very filling so you want a minimal amount of it so that you’re not overfeeding or under feeding them by accident. All this is advice I got from my pediatrician by the way

Not safe as it is a choking hazard, very old practice, unfortunately not all doctors believe in this update nor do they update their knowledge. You need to be very careful with the advice you get from them sometimes, which is so sad.

We had a doctor that suggested this to us. We changed doctors to get a second opinion because I knew it was against the official recommendation. New doctor said absolutely not