PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A new online tool is available to help parents with children on feeding tubes.
The Blenderized Tube Feeding Recipe Builder gives parents choices to provide their tube-fed children with healthy, nutritious meals right from the kitchen. Robin Cook, a pediatric surgical and trauma dietitian at Children's Hospital, said it's for children ages 1 to 13.
The website, Cook explained, lets parents create profiles using their child’s food preferences and allergies, calories needs, and any other limitations. Then, they can choose ingredients and build a recipe.
She said it makes mealtime a lot easier for parents wanting to feed their children items found in the kitchen and not from a prepackaged formula.
"It's essentially a recipe book where they go through and use food ingredients from a variety of categories, and those categories all get compiled into a recipe that they're able to put into a high quality blender and then give to their children through a feeding tube,” she added.
The online tool, which is free, is in collaboration with Nestle Health Science and Temple Univeristy's Fox School of Business.