If your baby is gagging, this is what may happen: They will eventually learn to cope with different textures and harder foods. This is because they are learning to regulate the amount of food they can chew and swallow at one time. Your baby may gag when you introduce solid foods – this is very normal. Read more about how to recognise the signs of choking. If they have brown or black skin, their gums, inside their lips, or their fingernails may begin to look blue. If your child has white skin, it may begin to look blue ( cyanosis) when they're choking. Your child's skin may also look red when they're gagging, but redness can be harder to see on brown and black skin. Gagging is a normal reflex as your baby learns to chew and swallow solid foods. We're also on Facebook & Google+.There's a difference between choking and gagging. You might soon encounter the device in one of the most gag-inducing places on Earth: your dentist's office.įollow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter nattyover or Life's Little Mysteries llmysteries. Scarborough, along with Michael Bailey-Van Kuren, a mechanical engineer at Miami University of Ohio, have patented a glovelike device that does the job mechanically. Next time you eat a banana, try applying pressure to the center of your palm. It's never too late to get back on track, however. after the 7-month mark) might throw off the process. Ideally, the suppression should coincide with the introduction of solid foods waiting too long to start the latter (i.e. It could be that the pressure from all that grasping gradually suppresses the gag reflex. Newborns have a "grasp reflex" that induces their fingers to curl into a fist when their palms are stroked. "I've gagged more than 160 adults," Scarborough said, "and the pressure point has worked on everybody." Although she's still looking into it, she suspects the wiring of the palm to a point in the brain stem that controls the gag reflex is no mere accident. When 2 pounds of pressure are applied to a point in the dead center of the right or left palm, the gag reflex recedes. "I found a pressure point on the hand that causes the gag reflex to move back in the mouth," she said. ![]() While working with kids who have gagging problems, Scarborough noticed that children's gag reflexes diminished when she held their hands. It's an open question why the window for something so vital - a lifetime of gag-free dining - would be so narrow. "Your gut can't absorb nutrients from larger food molecules until 4 to 6 months, so you really shouldn't introduce solid food before then, but if you wait until 7 months, you've missed the window." ![]() ![]() ![]() "Kids who are introduced to solid foods after 7 months of age are more likely to have problems with gagging," Scarborough said. Lastly, many gaggers' parents missed the window for when to introduce chunky food. Second, many extreme gaggers experienced some sort of food trauma at a young age (such as choking or severe diarrhea) that sent their brains into a state of permanent vigilance, especially with regard to foods textured similarly to whatever caused the incident. First, if your mom or dad gags, you might be genetically gag-prone, too. This difficulty clearing food from your mouth harkens back to the hard times you had as a 4- or 5-month-old, and suddenly, there you go a-gagging.īut why does your brain still think you're a choking baby? It could be any of the following reasons. "We don't know the neurologic underpinnings of this, but I think you get more nerve endings that are fired in response to sticky food, and it often takes more than one swallow to clear it off the throat and tongue," she said. More often, children and adults with a "hypersensitive gag reflex" react to the texture of thick and sticky foods such as bananas and mashed potatoes. "The worst I've seen is when I touched a kid's leg and he gagged," Scarborough told Life's Little Mysteries. However, in a sizable minority of people, this letting go doesn't happen properly. "If you give a 4- or 5-month-old some puree that isn't thin enough, they start gagging, and that's normal for them," Scarborough said - normal, because they can't yet digest chunks. When everything goes as planned, the reflex gradually gives way, allowing most chunky bits down our gullets by the 9-month mark. Aside from preventing choking, the human gag reflex serves a vital purpose during infancy: It helps moderate the transition from liquid to solid foods, said Donna Scarborough, a professor of speech pathology at Miami University of Ohio and a leading expert on gagging problems.
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